[R-sig-Geo] mapping introduction

[Roger Bivand]

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007, Dylan Beaudette wrote:

> On Saturday 24 November 2007 02:04:17 pm Tom Sgouros wrote:
>
> Hi Tom, sorry to hear that you haven't discovered what you were looking for
> yet. Here are some comments / suggestions.
>
>> Hello all:
>>
>> I was referred to this list when I asked a question on the r-help list
>> about mapping.  Unfortunately, I seem to be a little late to the party,
>> and a couple of weeks of monitoring the traffic have left me no more
>> enlightened than I was before, since it seems that the questions asked
>> are generally at a level I haven't approached yet.
>
> R is one of those applications which takes some time to get into. I have been
> a graduate student for a couple years now, and it took three attempts to get
> over the initial "activation energy" required for me to feel comfortable with
> R. That said, persistence was really the key factor in getting there.
>
>> I am an R user who wants to learn to make maps.  I have been using R to
>> analyze data associated with cities and towns in my area, and would
>> like to figure out how to get that data onto a map, but I'm having a
>> hard time seeing where to begin.

In addition to Dylen's helpful reply, you might like to review the 
"Spatial" Task View on your local CRAN mirror, and the Rgeo website linked 
from the Task View. There are many possible choices, but using the classes 
and methods in the sp package may suit you. They are reviewed in a note in 
R News (2005 (2), pp. 9-13), in an online e-seminar at:

http://www.geog.uu.nl/~pebesma/wun/

and in courses and tutorials such as:

http://www.bias-project.org.uk/ASDARcourse/

Hope this helps,

Roger

>
> Now that you are familiar with working in R, it might be a good idea to become
> familiar with basic GIS concepts. There are a number of open source tools
> which can be used for GIS work, and quite a large community in the form of
> mailing lists / IRC channels. There are a number of books which should be
> coming out in the next couple of months which cover the wide range of open
> source GIS software.
>
>> Assuming that I'm starting pretty much from zero, where can I start
>> reading in order to learn what is possible?  (And what to use to achieve
>> it.)
>
> Most of what I have learned about spatial statistics in R has been from a
> collection of books on R, R newsletter articles, and misc. online tutorials.
> Here is a link to some tutorials which illustrate using GRASS and R:
>
> http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/drupal/node/438
>
>> I'm also a little confused about whether people use R as a GIS stand-in,
>> or whether they use some GIS package, and then use R as an adjunct.  If
>> the latter, can anyone recommend GNU or other freeware GIS packages to
>> learn about?
>
> Since *most* R operations occur in memory, GIS operations on large datasets
> are best done in a dedicated GIS app like GRASS. For most of my work GRASS,
> GMT, PostGIS, R, and Mapserver are a tough combination to beat.
>
>> How about books to learn about them with?
>>
>
> See above suggestions. There should be two books out soon which are dedicated
> to opensource GIS applications- I would keep an eye out for these.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dylan
>
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-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no