[Qgis-developer] [AniMov] AniMove toolbox

[Anne Ghisla]

On Wed, 30 May 2012 10:07:29 +0200
Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:

> Hi all.
> In QGIS there is now a new analytical toolbox, called sextante,
> developed by Victor Olaya. The beauty of it (from our point of view)
> is that it is easy to add R scripts, and prepare models (even with a
> graphical interface) combining R, GRASS. GDAL, OTB and other
> backends. It does not require RPy2, so it avoids a lot of problems on
> Windows. I would suggest those of you who have interesting R AniMove
> scripts, or other models, to have a look to sextante, and try to
> integrate your work. This could lead to an "AniMove ToolBox" as an
> assemblage of scripts and models suitable for the analysis of animal
> movements. If you are interested in contributing your scripts,
> development skills, or othe resources, please let us know.

Hi Paolo, all,
I put QGIS-devs list in cc, as I have some technical questions.

I am of course interested in saving Windows users the trouble that
comes with missing rpy2 for Python 2.7. Apparently there is little
interest from users in promoting rpy2 packaging on Windows, maybe we
did not advertise it enough, or the users feel confident to have other
reliable alternatives?

Still, I'm not yet convinced to migrate the plugin to QGIS SEXTANTE
toolbox, as the latter is a very recent addition, and moreover I have
to fully understand how data are passed from QGIS to R.

In Homerange plugin, the user selects the QGIS layer containing input
point data. The plugins Python code reads features with the
layers'.dataProvider, and creates a Python array. The array is
converted by rpy2 into a R dataframe, and R processes the data. I chose
this approach, so that R relies on QGIS' readable data formats instead
of its own ones.

May I write a similar procedure with SEXTANTE, and let R take input
data from QGIS directly? From the users manual linked by the plugin,
data are read with readOGR and readGDAL. This makes me guess that data
are imported in R independently. If so, I can simply rewrite few lines
of HR plugin code, instead of starting from scratch.

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Anne
-- 
http://gis.cri.fmach.it/ghisla/
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