[R-sig-Geo] gdalUtils 0.2.0 now on CRAN

[Jonathan Greenberg]

Hi Thiago:

In general, this should have a small overhead compared to running GDAL
purely command line, but it really is just the GDAL binaries you are
running anyway (the wrapper calls those binaries directly).  The
overhead comes from the initial search/validation of the GDAL install
(a once-per-session occurrence).

Cheers!

--j

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 3:22 PM, Thiago V. dos Santos
<thi_veloso at yahoo.com.br> wrote:
> Dear Jonathan,
>
> First of all, congratulations on the package. It installed without a glitch
> in all of my platforms: Mac, Windows and Linux.
>
> However, I have a question on the speed of the wrapper functions.
>
> In the past sometimes I caught myself using GDAL instead of R for some
> routines when dealing with really large datasets (1GB+ shapefiles and 2GB+
> rasters). Most of the routines were resampling and reprojection.
>
> While R used to run for several hours, GDAL binaries finished the task in a
> matter of seconds.
>
> Unfortunately I don't have access to those previous large datasets to
> perform some tests with the package, and this is why I ask you: do you think
> that gdalUtils functions are as fast as the GDAL binaries?
>
> Many thanks in advance. Congratulations once again for the very useful
> package!
>
> Greetings,
> --
> Thiago V. dos Santos
> PhD student
> Land and Atmospheric Science
> University of Minnesota
> http://www.laas.umn.edu/CurrentStudents/MeettheStudents/ThiagodosSantos/index.htm
> Phone: (612) 323 9898
>
>
> On Wednesday, January 8, 2014 4:43 PM, Jonathan Greenberg
> <jgrn at illinois.edu> wrote:
> I would like to announce a new R package "gdalUtils", now on CRAN.
> gdalUtils is a set of R wrappers for most of the GDAL utility programs
> (http://gdal.org/gdal_utilities.html).  gdalUtils is a collaboration
> between Matteo Mattiuzzi and me.
>
> gdalUtils requires an already-installed GDAL on your system:
> http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/DownloadingGdalBinaries
>
> For Windows, I recommend installing QGIS Standalone
> (http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html) which appears to
> have the most up-to-date binaries of GDAL for the Windows operating
> system including support for HDF4/5 files.
>
> Note that this is NOT a replacement for Roger Bivand's fantastic rgdal
> package, it is a complementary package that simply provides R-wrappers
> for functions like gdalwarp, gdal_translate, ogr2ogr, etc.  We've
> tried to make the interface more R-like in terms of input parameters,
> and have provided some additional features such as (when relevant)
> returning outputs in Robert Hijman's raster format.  The parameter
> naming and the documentation follows GDAL, with permission from Frank
> Warmerdam (lead GDAL developer).
>
> We have also provided some value-added functions such as
> batch_gdal_translate and get_subdatasets (for extracting subdataset
> names from HDF4/5 and NetCDF files).
>
> I will note the primary motivation for developing this package was
> initially to provide (finally) HDF4/5 file support to Windows users
> (for Landsat and MODIS processing, among other things).  However, many
> of the GDAL functions provide additional capabilities that R functions
> do not currently have, and they are quite a bit faster than most of
> their R equivalents (compare projectRaster_rigorous in my
> spatial.tools package to gdalwarp(...,method="mode") for an example).
>
> When you first fire it up, it may take a bit to search for a valid
> GDAL install on your computer.  If you have more than one (Windows
> users may find this), it will use the latest version.  We tried to
> make this system-agnostic, but let us know if you have any problems
> getting the functions to work.  The best way to test is:
> library(gdalUtils)
> gdalinfo(version=TRUE)
> gdalinfo(formats=TRUE)
>
> Cheers!
>
> --j
>
> --
> Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
> Assistant Professor
> Global Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (GEARS) Laboratory
> Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> 259 Computing Applications Building, MC-150
> 605 East Springfield Avenue
> Champaign, IL  61820-6371
> Phone: 217-300-1924
> http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/
> AIM: jgrn307, MSN: jgrn307 at hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307, Skype: jgrn3007
>
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>



-- 
Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
Assistant Professor
Global Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (GEARS) Laboratory
Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
259 Computing Applications Building, MC-150
605 East Springfield Avenue
Champaign, IL  61820-6371
Phone: 217-300-1924
http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/
AIM: jgrn307, MSN: jgrn307 at hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307, Skype: jgrn3007