In mid-March, 2014 Google announced that it added support for GeoJSON to the Google Maps API (v3). Although other mapping APIs, namely Leaflet, have supported GeoJSON data for quite some time, easy access to GeoJSON in Google Maps will simplify the coding lives of many developers who often use the Google Maps API. In the […]
Continue reading →dplyrThe R package dplyr, written by Hadley Wickham is only a few months old but has already become an important part of our data analysis/manipulation workflow, replacing functions that we have used for years. There are several reasons why dplyr is such a valuable tool but most important from my perspective are the following: Speed. […]
Continue reading →We use PostgreSQL/PostGIS to manage a lot of our tabular and geographic data from the US Census. In terms of workflow we will either download a shapefile manually from ftp://ftp.census.gov/geo/tiger/ or, if we’re dealing with more than one file (block groups or blocks for example), we will do this from within R (using the download.file() […]
Continue reading →ggmap PackageOne of the great pieces of the new ggmap package is the geocoding functionality. Other R functions can be used to geocode but they fail to provide detailed output like geocode accuracy which is often critical. You need to know if the lat/long in the output refers to a rooftop location or a city center, […]
Continue reading → data.tableFor a recent project we have been working with a relatively large database of all historical air pollution data for New York City going all way back to the 1950s. Including both daily and hourly measurements the database includes about 10 million records and 20 variables. Using traditional R functions working with a database of […]
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