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.
Installation
You can install latlon2map from GitHub with:
remotes::install_github("giocomai/latlon2map")Use
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.
Shiny app
The package includes a shiny app that facilitates matching latitude/longitude data frames wtih geographic units.
ll_app()