[R-sig-Geo] Announcing the R Shapefile Contest

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 4:22 PM,  <arilamstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I wanted to let people here know that I am sponsoring the "R Shapefile
> Contest":
>
> http://www.arilamstein.com/blog/2016/07/12/announcing-r-shapefile-contest/
>
> For the last few years I've done a lot of work with creating choropleth
> maps of government datasets. But I've also felt a bit limited, in that I
> don't know the full range of analyses that R can do with shapefiles.
>
> I'm hoping that this contest can get a lot of submissions which really show
> off the types of analyses that can be done with R and shapefiles.

 I have a brilliant analysis I would have loved to submit to this
contest but the agency from which I got the data has been enlightened
enough not to use the clunky, outdated, and limited "shapefile" format
and has released the data as a modern, OGC-standard GeoPackage. My
variables have long names, my metadata is stored with my data, and its
all in one file instead of six. But sadly, because you limit the
contest with "The analysis must ... do something with a shapefile" I
can't compete.

 Shapefiles are an awful, awful format which Esri didn't think people
would actually use. They should not be encouraged. Maybe I'll start a
GeoPackage contest. Or you could just have a geospatial vector data
contest and not discriminate against data formats.

Barry