R help - Oct 2014 - rgdal: Convert ESRI ArcGis geo database (gdb directory) to geojson, or shapefile map

Hello,

I have an ESRI  ArGis geo database directory which I would like to convert
to geojson or a shape file (or anything else that I can read into R).

Unfortunately that does not work out of the box with rgdal, because it does
not come with the fileGDB or openfileGDB driver.
I could successfully install gdal and the fileGDB driver/extension, but it
seems that i can use gdal only to convert the gdb file to a SQL database.

So before I start to learn about SQL, I thought I ask if anybody can point
me to a tutorial or similar that explains how to convert the contents of a
GDB folder to a R-readable format.

I also wondered if it would be possible to let rgdal know that it could
access the required drivers because I installed them manually.
I would appreciate any hint about this too!

Thanks in advance!
Best Guido

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

This driver is present in the Windows binary on CRAN (at least it was
in July):
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/attachments/20140710/5dda6bc4/attachment.pl

I'm not sure about on Linux, I thought it was there but I may have
inadvertently switched to an older GDAL on some systems. I can try
this out on a test VM though, I'm keen to have rgal-recipes for
installing on various systems.

Let me know if:
1) you want Windows or Linux
2) you want help building / installing on Linux (Ubuntu)

(Compiling the Windows binary is hard and mysterious, but I'd love to
be able to do that too. I can do all of it except the final .zip
package bundle which I don't understand yet)

Cheers, Mike.

On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 9:06 PM, Guido Biele
<guido.biele at neuro-cognition.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have an ESRI  ArGis geo database directory which I would like to convert
> to geojson or a shape file (or anything else that I can read into R).
>
> Unfortunately that does not work out of the box with rgdal, because it does
> not come with the fileGDB or openfileGDB driver.
> I could successfully install gdal and the fileGDB driver/extension, but it
> seems that i can use gdal only to convert the gdb file to a SQL database.
>
> So before I start to learn about SQL, I thought I ask if anybody can point
> me to a tutorial or similar that explains how to convert the contents of a
> GDB folder to a R-readable format.
>
> I also wondered if it would be possible to let rgdal know that it could
> access the required drivers because I installed them manually.
> I would appreciate any hint about this too!
>
> Thanks in advance!
> Best Guido
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


-- 
Michael Sumner
Software and Database Engineer
Australian Antarctic Division
Hobart, Australia
e-mail: mdsumner at gmail.com