Building Spatial Databases
Content for Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Now that you have the complete picture of predicates, measures, and transformers; it’s time to use them on some actual data. This lecture is meant to be the “practical” application of the ideas you’ve learned in our previous discussions of manipulating vector and and raster data. We’ll start by planning our analysis together and then working through the steps.
Readings
Technical Details
The introductory vignette for the
sfpackage has a lot of useful info onsfobjects and conventions.Section 2.2 on Vector Data and Sections 5.1-5.3 on Geographic Operations in Lovelace et al. (Lovelace et al. 2019) - for more details about vectors and geometric operations on vectors.
Section 3.1 and 3.2 of Spatial Data Science, a
bookdownproject by Edzer Pebesma and Roger Bivand (of thesf,sp,rgeos, andrgdalpackages).Chapter 6 and 7 of Analyzing US Census Data: Methods, Maps and Models in R by Walker (2023) is a great reference for accessing Census data with the
tidycensusandtigrispackages. It’s also a great introduction to building spatial databases for analysis.
Objectives
By the end of today, you should be able to:
Practice pseudocode to plan an analysis
Link geoprocessing steps to research questions
Explore how geoprocessing choices affect results
Slides
The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.