[R-sig-Geo] mapping introduction

[Paulo van Breugel]

Hi Tom,

In addition to the (very useful) earlier posts, I would like to point 
out SAGA GIS. It is a very good GIS software (and freeware / open 
source), especially for grid analyses. It has a command line version, 
which together with the ability of R to  invoke system commands using 
either 'Shell' or 'system' makes it fairly easy to do the typical GIS 
work in SAGA, and carry out other analyses in R, all from within R. With 
the recent release of the RSAGA package for R this has become 
considerably easier.

The documentation for SAGA is somewhat poor, but there are two very 
useful user guides available. See the SAGA website 
(http://www.saga-gis.uni-goettingen.de/html/index.php) for links. See 
CRAN for the RSAGA package.

Paulo