[R-sig-Geo] Issues importing BIG shapefile

[Adrian.Baddeley at csiro.au]

Tyler Dean Rudolph prairie.picker at gmail.com<mailto:prairie.picker at gmail.com> encountered problems converting data from class 'SpatialLinesDataFrame' (package sp) to class 'psp' (package spatstat). For very large shapefiles (containing a quarter of a million line segments), this conversion was taking 24 hours on a desktop.

The code involved is in the packages 'maptools' and 'spatstat'.

The main bottleneck has been fixed in the next version of spatstat (1.15-1) which has just been sent to CRAN. With this modification the same data can be converted in 5-10 minutes on a laptop.

Minor modifications to maptools have also been recommended to the maintainer of maptools.

Adrian Baddeley