Beautiful maps with R and Google Maps

It’s been awhile since I have posted on this blog. I have been caught up in the midst of publishing my thesis works as a book which is now available for at amazon and trying to be adventurous during the harsh but still exciting Norwegian winter.

A friend of mine asked me last week to help him plot locations of boreholes, that he is doing research on, to a decent map. I came up with a suggestion of creating it in R using Google Maps as a base map. Of course this could have been done easily and more aesthetically attractive using the conventional GIS softwares. It is more exciting and reproducible where the R script can be reused easily.

The location of the boreholes was originally recorded using gps in UTM coordinate format. Therefore, I used the spTransform method of rgdal package to convert them into latitudes and longitudes.  The rest of the codes are listed below.

	library(rgdal)
	library(RgoogleMaps)
	boreholes<- read.csv("boreholes.csv", sep=",", header=TRUE)
	bh_grd <- SpatialPoints(boreholes[,c("East","North")],
	proj4string=CRS("+proj=utm +zone=32 +datum=WGS84"))
	bholes<- SpatialPointsDataFrame(bh_grd,boreholes[,-c(2,3)])
	bholes<-bholes[,-c(2,3)]
	bh_geo<- spTransform(bholes, CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84"))
	North<-coordinates(bh_geo)[,2]
	East<-coordinates(bh_geo)[,1]
	bb <- qbbox(lat=range(North), lon=range(East))
	m <- c(mean(North), mean(North))
	zoom <- min(MaxZoom(latrange=bb$latR,lonrange=bb$lonR))
	Map <- GetMap.bbox(bb$lonR, bb$latR, zoom=zoom, maptype="mobile",
	NEWMAP=F, destfile="map.png", RETURNIMAGE=T);
	tmp <- PlotOnStaticMap(Map,lat=North, lon=East,
	cex=1.5,pch=20,col="red", add=F, verbose=0);
	tmp <- TextOnStaticMap(Map,lat=North, lon=East+.0007, cex=.8, font=4,
	col="black", labels= boreholes$Number, add=T, verbose=0);
	tmp <- PlotArrowsOnStaticMap(Map, lat0=min(North),lon0=max(East)+.006,
	lat1=min(North)+.0006,lon1=max(East)+.006,lwd=6,col="black",add=T);
	#Satellite image as a base map
	SMap <- GetMap.bbox(bb$lonR, bb$latR, zoom=zoom, maptype="satellite",
	NEWMAP=F, destfile="map.png", RETURNIMAGE=TRUE);
	tmp <- PlotOnStaticMap(SMap,lat=North, lon=East,
	cex=1.5,pch=20,col="red", add=F, verbose=0);
	tmp <- TextOnStaticMap(SMap,lat=North, lon=East+.0007, cex=.8, font=4,
	col="yellow", labels= boreholes$Number, add=T, verbose=0);
	tmp <- PlotArrowsOnStaticMap(SMap, lat0=min(North),lon0=max(East)+.006,
	lat1=min(North)+.0006,lon1=max(East)+.006,lwd=6,col="yellow",add=T);

view raw boreholes.R hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Maps give Europeans close-up picture of emissions from industrial facilities

Online maps published by the  European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR), allow users to pinpoint the key environmental data and the main sources of air pollution from industrial facilities across Europe. The European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) is the a Europe-wide register that provides easily accessible key environmental data from industrial facilities in European Union Member States and in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Serbia and Switzerland. It replaces and improves upon the previous European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER). The register contains data reported annually by some 28,000 industrial facilities covering 65 economic activities across Europe. The interactive map shows where certain pollutants are released from individual industrial plants. . The Europe-wide register aims to help Europeans actively engage in decisions affecting the environment. The map search option provides a geographical approach to the E-PRTR data. The map can even be viewed here in maximized version.

5 Great Maps... That are just great!

Google's Geo Developer blog posted about five great maps developed based on the Google's Maps API. The list includes the renowned photo sharing tool - instagram's app called InstaEarth,  which makes use of the Places API to help users discover instagram photography in a map.

InstaEarth

Another interesting application that uses the Maps API is the Submarine Cable Map from TeleGeography which makes use of the Google Fusion Tables to generate map layers of submarine cable routes. The map also uses Styled Maps to customize the standard Google base maps for better visualization of the cable routes.

TeleGeography - Submarine Cable Map

Check out the rest three here.

Open Street Map Edits of Berlin City 2007 - 2010

ITO World produced an impressive visualization video of the tremendous amount of mapping that has been done by the Open Street Map community on Berlin city. The video shows a white line each time a new route is entered or an old one edited. The video shows a growth of active participation in the OSM community.

Berlin OSM Edits 2007-2010 from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Google LatLong: Live traffic information for 13 European countries...

Google LatLong: Live traffic information for 13 European countries...: "Since introducing the live traffic feature on Google Maps in 2008 , our team has been working hard to make this feature available to more u..."

Chronological visualization map by opendatacity

Green party politician Malte Spitz sued the German telecoms giant, Deutsche Telekom, to hand over the data recorded from his mobile phone on his whereabouts. The data revealed was stunning where the cellphone company has recorded and saved more than 35,000 location data from his mobile phone for the a period of six months which is about 78% of the time. It traced him where he worked, the cities he visited, the places he hang out , basically where he was at every moment of his life, in spite of that, Spitz never knew he was been tracked.

Spitz made the data available to a German newspaper Zeit Online who produced a striking interactive map of his daily activities.

Guilhem Vellut's Tutorial on Thematic mapping with the Google Maps Flash API

This nice tutorial was posted by Guilhem Vellut in 2008 on his blog about how to create a thematic map with the Google Maps Flash API. I found it really interesting to share it. Click the link below to read full post.

Tutorial : Thematic mapping with the Google Maps Flash API « Leveraging Visionary Paradigms