The goal of latlon2map is to make it simple to process spatial data,
and to match tabular data distributed in spreadsheets with
longitude/latitude columns with various geographical units based on
shapefile distributed by statistical offices such as Eurostat.
The package includes a number of convenience functions that download and cache locally pre-processed files to reduce boilerplate code commonly found in data projects, hopefully speeding up the data pipeline and favouring reproducibility.
By dafault, latlon2map stores all downloaded files in the current
working directory. However, it makes is easy to keep them on a single
folder, preventing the common issue of having multiple copies of the
same geographic files for each data project on a computer. The code
remains transferrable and reproducible, as missing files are simply
downloaded on the fly if unavaiable locally.
You can install latlon2map from GitHub with:
remotes::install_github("giocomai/latlon2map")All latlon2map function starts with ll_ to facilitate
auto-completion. By default, data are stored in a folder called
ll_data inside the working directory. However, I suggest caching data
in a separate folder for system-wide caching: you will not need to
re-download again geographic files for different projects, and you will
not unncessarily sync multiple copies of those files for each project
that needs them. You need to call e.g. ll_set_folder("~/R/") once per
session. Given that you may well download big files that take longer
than the 60 seconds to download, you are advised to set a reasonably
high timeout for downloads at the beginning of each session.
library("latlon2map")
ll_set_folder(fs::path(fs::path_home_r(),
"R",
"ll_data"))
#> /home/g/R/ll_data
options(timeout = 6000)There are currently a number of functions facilitating downloads of
geographic datasets, mostly from Eurostat’s website. They all return
sf objects, all of them transformed to crs 4326, all of them keeping
all of the columns present in the original dataset. Future versions will
likely add standard-named columns to facilitate matching data between
different datasets.
For reference all of the original data are kept in the ll_data/shp/
folder, so it is possible to check metadata about each dataset.
Information on copyright is printed to the console each time a given
data source is used.
Functions calls such as ll_get_world(resolution = 60) can safely be
used where you would usually place your sf object/data frame. They
will download items when they are not locally available, and will simply
load pre-processed data on the following calls.
Check the package vignette for more details, examples, and use cases.
The package includes a shiny app that facilitates matching latitude/longitude data frames wtih geographic units.
ll_app()