For years we have used ArcGIS’ Network Analyst to compute network distances and route-based service areas. In the past we found open source options to be lacking. We experimented, for example, with pgRouting in 2014 and our rough assessment was that it did not provide an adequate alternative. Details are in our blog post on […]
Continue reading →rgdalR has become a go-to tool for spatial analysis in many settings. You can read and edit spatial data, conduct geoprocessing and spatial analysis and create static and interactive maps. Of course, the first step in spatial analysis with R is often reading in your spatial data and this step can be confusing and frustrating. […]
Continue reading →gdalAlthough we still use ESRI products such as ArcGIS for geographic analysis, more and more we find ourselves turning to open source software like PostGIS and QGIS. In many cases, though, even PostGIS and QGIS are more software than necessary for a given task and we prefer to skip the ‘middleman’ in favor of the […]
Continue reading →Although many data science-related projects can be completed with a single software tool we often find that decisions about what tool to use for a project involve weighing a combination of what tool would be “best” for the job, what tools we're most familiar with and whether we already have scripts we can use. As […]
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() […]
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