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

[Bacou, Melanie]

Just chiming in, but I don't see any reason for wrapping `readOGR()` and 
`writeOGR()`. For the sake of code portability and readability, the fact 
that these 2 functions work for a myriad of vector-based GIS formats is 
a great thing. You can skip naming parameters to save typing if that's 
an issue:

readOGR("my_folder", "cities")
writeOGR(cities, "my_folder", "cities", "GPKG")
writeOGR(cities, "my_folder", "cities", "ESRI Shapefile")

Also contrary to others I see a benefit to saving an object's geometry 
and attributes in 2 separate files, can save I/O operations. Anyone who 
works with GeoJSON files knows these can also become very large and 
cumbersome. The main problem with shapefiles is the DBF specification 
that's a little outdated.

--Mel.


On 7/15/2016 4:32 AM, Rainer M Krug wrote:
> stachel2 at msu.edu writes:
>
>> I wrote a **very** elementary blog post showing how to use the
>> GeoPackage format with R:
>> http://jsta.github.io/2016/07/14/geopackage-r.html
>>
> This is nice - thanks.
>
> One general problem I see in =contrast to the shape file is it's
> simplicity for writing and reading in GeoPackage format: you need the
> swiss army knife package rgdal. This works perfectly, don't get me
> wrong, but from the user perspective it is much easier to use one
> command without having to specify dsn and driver, as you can do with
> shapefiles (e.g. in the package maptools).
>
> It would be great if there would be a wrapper package around rgdal to
> make the usage of GeoPackage easier. It shouldn't be to difficult just
> to put the basic functions into a package (writeGPG(), readGPG(), ...).
>
> I just created a github (https://github.com/rkrug/rGeoPackage) wherer
> ideas can be collected for this package.
>
> Please join in and post suggestions for functions and functionality
> here or on the github page - I won't have much time before end of August.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Rainer
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-sig-Geo mailing list
> R-sig-Geo at r-project.org
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]