[R-sig-Geo] Qgis-Rmanage and geographic display of spatial objects

[Agustin Lobo]

Carson Farmer wrote:
> This is certainly where I would like to see manageR go someday! But 
> unfortunately this would entail programming in C, which requires someone 
> much more skilled than myself!
> For now I simply use it instead of jumping between the two applications...
> Your suggestion about displaying sp objects was a topic of discussion 
> for the QGIS bridge2R team (of which I am a member), but we ended up 
> putting this aside, as we felt that the average QGIS user would rather 
> have all the R stuff happen 'behind the scenes' on their input vector 
> layers directly, rather than knowingly interacting with R.  

I cannot but disagree here. "QGIS user have all the R stuff happen 
'behind the scenes'" because they cannot have it on the scenario. I strongly
recommend having a look to GeoDa to feel the power of interactive
exploratory geographic data analysis. It is a fundamental step for 
thinking and generating hypothesis that are formally tested afterwards
and then interactively displayed again. Unfortunately, GeoDa does not
have a real geographic display, as would be the case of QGis, and does
not have the amazing flexibility of R. I note
that GeoDa is becoming OS at some point,  and could be an excellent 
source of inspiration.

Also, note how powerful would be applying R syntaxis to the data tables 
associated to vector data. This is very easy with the "data slot" of R
SpatialDataFrame objects, but there is always the annoying step of going
through the shp export to display in QGIS (although I think that your
Rmanage makes easier the step).


> I tend to 
> agree with this idea for that particular project, but for manageR, 
> displaying sp objects would be great! 

Yes!

I think in the end this would
> require an ogr/gdal driver for sp objects as Barry Rowlingson has 
> previously suggested here, and in the r-sig-geo lists.
> 
> I have started to look at some brushing and linking functions using the 
> iPlots R package, and should hopefully be able to implement some of 
> these things in the future...?

Actually, perhaps we could make people from Rosuda get interested on
developing an "igeoplots" package!

Agus

> Carson
> 
> 
> Agustin Lobo wrote:
>> Thanks Carson, just knowing that this is an R console is enough.
>> Now, after making a simple plot(), I'm just dreaming: if we could
>> display sp objects directly, not only avoiding the intermediate
>> shp file but being able of plotting columns of the dataframe
>> as statistical graphics  in R...
>> and soon being able to interact between the R plot and the
>> geographic display (a linked brushing, for example), tools
>> like in GeoDa but with a real GIS diaplay...
>>
>> Great job!
>> (I'm forwarding the r-sig-geo list just for them
>> to know your developments)
>>
>> Agus
-- 
Dr. Agustin Lobo
Institut de Ciencies de la Terra "Jaume Almera" (CSIC)
LLuis Sole Sabaris s/n
08028 Barcelona
Spain
Tel. 34 934095410
Fax. 34 934110012
email: Agustin.Lobo at ija.csic.es
http://www.ija.csic.es/gt/obster