Slide 1
Guy LansleyDepartment of Geography, [email protected]
@GuyLansley
GIS for Social Data and Crisis MappingUniversity of Kent,
Canterbury 9th September 2016
Using R to Visualize Spatial Data:R as a GIS
What is a Geographic Information System?Geographic relates to a
specific place on or in relation to the Earths surfaceInformation
is data to which some value or interpretation has been added. In
GI, the information relates to measurements, maps, images, sounds
etc. of the Earths surfaceSystem a system designed to perform a
wide range of functions on and with GI
Although GISystems have developed greatly over the past fifty
years, their underlying principles have remained the sameGIS
How do we visualise spatial data?Layers in a GIS
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How do we visualise spatial data?Layers
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How do we visualise spatial data?E.g.
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Maps are models of reality
Models are generalisations of realityVisualisations will
determine what is representedIt is therefore easy to
misrepresent
Monmonier (1996) How to lie with maps
Popular Open SoftwareFor analysing dataR - www.r-project.org and
RStudio - www.rstudio.comPython www.python.org and Jupyter -
www.jupyter.org
DatabasesPostgreSQL - www.postgresql.org & PostGIS -
www.postgis.net
Geographic information systemsQGIS - www.qgis.org
QGIS
A fully functional open source GISFantastical visualization
capacitiesAn excellent alternative to ArcMap
R and RstudioAdvantagesIt is fastIt is open sourceIt is a well
developed, simple and effective programming languageLots of people
use it- New York Times, Google, Facebook, Ebay, University
Researchers, etc.It can do anything you want it to (almost)It
interfaces to other software very easilyCan also call functions
from other programming languages (including SQL, Python, Java and
many more)It now has a large user community with lots of support
and documentation
www.rstudio.com www.r-project.org
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Features of RCommand line interface.Object oriented. You create
things with names using the
