[R-sig-Geo] polygon buffers?

[Barry Rowlingson]

Agustin Lobo wrote:

> I dream with a GIS tool (A GIS display tool for R? An R plugging for 
> Qgis? etc)
> that could display spatial R objects. This is beyond current
> tools, based on exporting (hence duplicating space and troubles)
> R objects to other formats.

  Oooh, you are giving me ideas! I've been working with R and QGIS for 
some time, linked by Python plugins.

  For example, my Basic Stats plugin for QGIS lets you do data summaries 
of QGIS layers (histograms of attributes, x-y plots etc):

http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings/Software/Spqr/

  This is only a small step from writing what's called a 'Provider' for 
QGIS, that could display sp-style data objects from R on the QGIS map 
canvas...

  If my Java skills were more developed I'd be working on something 
similar for OpenJUMP, which I think has all the topology operators like 
buffering that the original poster on this thread was interested in.

Barry