Brief Description
Again, fishing was the primary motivation here. As a kid I would collect Loran numbers from other fisherman of all the “secret” places to fish off the Florida coast. I started a spread sheet, and even had a big map drawn on a piece of butcher paper of the “secret” places, separate from the publicly available ones. Only myself and Jerry Vaughn, and our closest friends know where those wings from the P-3 off Mayport ended up… And that place in the Gulf side of the Keys where the Goliath Grouper as big as Volkswagon bugs hang out…
Anyway, the idea is to have some better, free GIS tools. ArcGIS is great, but it is overkill in features, and is too expensive. So I wanted to have a system of data (databases and KML files) and tools (in S language) to manipulate them. And also apply it to my travels, and bike tours, and …
Finally, I have an old C library I wrote for arcView to create smooth conditional maps (smooth maps) using the Nadaraya-Watson algorithm. I’d like to transfer that to the library to take points and create a smooth surface from them. The R code is in the same directory.
Specific Objective
To create some data standards (databases and spreadsheets, with certain parameterizations of lat/long, loran) and methods for them in S4 classes. Specifically, methods to write to KML, starting with points and lines, and with some use of altitude data (only to make altitude profiles for bike trips).
Product/Results
The product here will be an R library and methods for working with spatial data. I’m really hoping somebody else will write some more basic libraries in addition to the ones out there, but who knows if/when that will happen. I did see the Rgis project in the pipeline. Perhaps I/royal we could just write an output writer for that library?
Status
I wrote some code to create some KML files of fishing spots when I was on vacation in May 2008. Unfortunately, it’s backed up in another country, and I won’t have access to it til July 2009 at the earliest. Long story.
Current Research
Current status of data and tools…
Fishing Related
The first problem I have is that half my data is in loran coordinates relative to two towers (chains) near northeast Florida. So I need a script to do the non-trivial conversion to lat/lang, one is available via the coast guard from this script to turn loran into lat/long.
Biking Related
Another thing I’m doing is figuring out my bike routes. Normally, this would be trivial, but I happen to be in Costa Rica, where road names are anathema, building numbers are foreign, and almost all navigation is by landmark. So most of my navigation is by compass and map, and is validated by asking multiple bystanders if this is indeed the road to blah. Another issue is that of wanting to know what the altitude profile is. This one route was a 7,000 foot climb. I never made it to the top. I was curious to see how this fared with other routes (like the heavy stage of the Tour de France). To do that, I ended up using bikely.
Travel Related
Being on the road for a year, my friends and family are always asking, where are you living, what’s it like? So, I decided to put together some KML for them with photos and descriptions embedded.
Data Sources Here
All of the spatial data resources I know about reside on the spatial data page.
