[R-sig-Geo] R / ArcGIS

Roger Bivand Roger.Bivand at nhh.no
Fri Feb 17 15:00:37 CET 2012


On Fri, 17 Feb 2012, Edzer Pebesma wrote:

> On 02/17/2012 12:18 PM, Roger Bivand wrote:
>> On Fri, 17 Feb 2012, Michael Denslow wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Edzer Pebesma
>>> <edzer.pebesma at uni-muenster.de> wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I might succeed meeting with some ESRI / ArcGIS folks at AAG next week;
>>>> I'm in touch with them in particular about linking R to ArcGIS.
>>>>
>>>> I would like to find out if any of you has been successful (or
>>>> unsuccessful) in reading or writing ArcGIS geodatabase files directly
>>>> from R, by using the rgdal driver, or by some other means.
>>>
>>> Thanks for working on this. I have had success reading .mdb files but
>>> not .gdb files. I typically use rgdal for this sort of thing. I was
>>> under the impression that GDAL support for .gdb files started with
>>> 1.9.
>>
>> This is off-topic here - the topic here is space-time data.
>
> Not completely, as I started two topics in one thread. The first one,
> interfacing ArcGIS personal geodatabases through rgdal (OGR drivers) has
> been dealt with here:

OK, my misunderstanding. Wrt. file geodatabase access, the point would be 
to get them to open the API code, but it likely links to Arc DLLs, rather 
than being free-standing. So personal geodatabase access is OK in GDAL 
1.9.0 built against an ODBC provider, as in the version already available 
for forthcoming R 2.15.0, but file geodatabase access must have the API 
SDK from ESRI.

I wrongly focused on the second theme as though it was the only one.

Roger

>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2009-June/005889.html
>
> and more recently with the closed source ArcGIS 10.0 API here:
>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2012-January/014090.html
>
> followed by:
>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2012-February/014094.html
>
> and follow-ups would be easier findable when added to that thread.
>
> The second topic addressed dealing with space-time features between R
> and ArcGIS, for which rgdal/OGR could not be a solution, AFAICS.
>
>>
>> Your question is answered with respect to Personal geodatabases on the
>> Windows platform in thread:
>>
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.geo/13571
>>
>> (link to gmane because it crosses a month boundary). You did join that
>> thread, and said there that you are using OSX. You were able to open
>> Pgeo files, I think. Are you thinking of the new file geodatabase
>> format? If you read:
>>
>> http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_filegdb.html
>>
>> you will see that you must build GDAL linking to the proprietary FileGDB
>> API SDK, which requires an ESRI global account. Reading the OGR format
>> file would tell you that, no?
>>
>> Roger
>>
>>>
>>> I am very interested in this issue since I am a regular user of ArcGIS
>>> (teaching) and R (research).
>>>
>>> Michael
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Another issue is reading/writing spatio-temporal features  (netcdf does
>>>> spatio-temporal grids/arrays pretty well it seems); rumours go that
>>>> ArcGIS might, in the near future, support reading/writing SpatiaLite.
>>>>
>>>> With best regards,
>>>> --
>>>> Edzer Pebesma
>>>> Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of Münster
>>>> Weseler Straße 253, 48151 Münster, Germany. Phone: +49 251
>>>> 8333081, Fax: +49 251 8339763  http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de
>>>> http://www.52north.org/geostatistics      e.pebesma at wwu.de
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, NHH Norwegian School of Economics,
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


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