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DATA MINING
Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams |
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R provides a set of tools for reading geographic (map) data, particularly ESRI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefileshapefiles, and plotting and manipulating such data. Maps for many countries are available, particularly the US, Europe, and New Zealand. Limited Australian map data is also freely available.
download.file("http://www.vdstech.com/mapdata/australia.zip", "australia.zip")
system("unzip australia.zip; rm australia.zip")
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The data can be read in with readShapePoly and displayed with plot. Australia has a few outlying islands which we crop from the main focus of the map here using xlim and ylim.
library(maptools)
aus <- readShapePoly("australia.shp")
plot(aus, lwd=2, border="grey", xlim=c(115,155), ylim=c(-35,-20))
dev.off()
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The class of the resulting object (aus) is SpatialPolygonsDataFrame. Such an object has a collection of slots. For example, the data slot includes meta information about the region recorded in the data frame.
> aus@data
FIPS_ADMIN GMI_ADMIN ADMIN_NAME FIPS_CNTRY CNTRY_NAME
0 AS01 AUS-ACT Australian Capital Territory AS Australia
1 AS02 AUS-NSW New South Wales AS Australia
2 AS03 AUS-NTR Northern Territory AS Australia
3 AS04 AUS-QNS Queensland AS Australia
4 AS05 AUS-SAS South Australia AS Australia
5 AS06 AUS-TSM Tasmania AS Australia
6 AS07 AUS-VCT Victoria AS Australia
7 AS08 AUS-WAS Western Australia AS Australia
REGION CONTINENT POP_ADMIN SQKM_ADMIN SQMI_ADMIN TYPE_ENG
0 Australia/New Zealand Australia 292475 2342.295 904.36 Territory
1 Australia/New Zealand Australia 6338919 803110.812 310081.09 State
2 Australia/New Zealand Australia 161294 1352365.000 522148.09 Territory
3 Australia/New Zealand Australia 3107362 1733475.000 669294.69 State
4 Australia/New Zealand Australia 1445153 985308.500 380427.59 State
5 Australia/New Zealand Australia 472122 68131.477 26305.56 State
6 Australia/New Zealand Australia 4354611 227781.406 87946.40 State
7 Australia/New Zealand Australia 1655588 2533628.000 978233.81 State
TYPE_LOC
0 Territory
1 State
2 Territory
3 State
4 State
5 State
6 State
7 State
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The bounding box of the plot is available using bbox.
> bbox(aus)
min max
r1 112.90721 159.10190
r2 -54.75389 -10.05139
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