user2016

Simple feature access is an open standard for handling feature data (mostly points, lines and polygons) that has seen wide adoption in databases, javascript, and linked data. Currently, R does not have a complete solution for reading, handling and writing simple feature data. With funding from the R consortium, we will implement support for simple features in R. This talk discusses the challenges and potential benefits when doing so. It also points out challenges when analysing attribute data associated with simple features. In particular, the question whether a property refers to a property at every location of a feature (such as the land cover of a polygonndelineating a forest) or merely to a summary statistic computed over the whole feature (such as population count over a county) is to be solved. Its consequences for further analysis and data integration will be illustrated, and solutions will be discussed.