Package for mapping Pacific countries and spatial objects

[deanmarchiori]

A customised package for mapping and dealing with spatial data relating to pacific countries and regions could help standardise and speed up the production of insights such as choropleth maps etc.

Further Context

https://github.com/ellisp/frs-r-package/blob/master/pkg/R/draw_pac_map.R

[gvdr]

Bringing some detail and love to this issue :-) This is project is in sync with #12, and might be run in parallel or all together.

We at the Pacific Community | Communauté du Pacifique disseminate a treasure trove of Pacific data through our SPC .Stat portal. The data is available in a very robust model, SDMX , adopted globally by many other international organizations (UN, WHO, ILO, Eurostat, ...); the datasets are accessible through well-documented Rest(ish) API and a Data Explorer web interfaced.

SDKs for SDMX exists in various languages, including a couple in R. However, they tend to be very general, and more looking forward the SDMX-savvy user: some simple tasks are less easy to do that one would like (i.e., collecting all the data for a specific country or set of countries, extracting metadata in a tidy format, ...). #12 proposes to write a package covering the gap left between {rsdmx} and the users will be great. #13 (this issue) instead looks at crafting some well honed tools to produce geographic data viz, starting from Pacific region maps and Pacific data (maybe from SDMX formats).

As for what might be needed to build (think in terms of things you might learn, rather than prereqs for the project):

• Interaction with REST APIs
• Extracting info from XML documents
• Geo data viz using packages such as {sf}(https://r-spatial.github.io/sf/), {mapview}(https://r-spatial.github.io/mapview/), {tmap}(https://r-tmap.github.io/tmap/), ...

[gvdr]

Thanks to the invaluable work of @shandiya @MilesMcBain and @lawremi the project is now pushing forward here:
https://github.com/PacificCommunity/pdh-stat-plotr_map :-)