← Back to all sparks
I

inbospatial

ANALYTICS
Velocity0.0

A Collection of Useful R Functions for Spatial Data

A thin R wrapper over Flemish geospatial services, adding one standard at a time

r-packagegeospatialogc-apiwcsflandersresearch-tooling
Current state
inbospatial gives R users direct access to Flemish and Belgian government spatial services without hand-writing request URLs. Three releases over three years have built it up service by service: WMS and WMTS tile shorthands and projection-distortion utilities first, then the Flanders digital elevation model, and now OGC API Features querying plus layer discovery for WCS services. Much of each release is hardening the MHT-file parsing that these services return.
Where it's heading
The package grows by absorbing one more service standard per release rather than by adding abstraction. The 0.1.0 additions point the same way — get_feature_ogc() covers a newer OGC standard alongside the existing WCS and WFS paths, and get_wcs_layers() addresses the practical problem that you cannot query a coverage without first knowing what layers exist. Release cadence is slow and driven by which service the maintainers needed next.
Prediction
Expect the next release to add another regional service endpoint or extend OGC API Features coverage, on a timescale of a year or more given the gaps between the three releases so far.

Recent moves

  1. 4mo ago

    OGC API Features querying and WCS layer discovery arrive

    Adds get_feature_ogc() for OGC API Features and get_wcs_layers() to list what a WCS service actually offers, plus MercatorNet coverage support. Layer discovery is the quietly useful half — it removes the guesswork before a coverage query.

    View source ↗
  2. 1y ago

    Flanders digital elevation model becomes queryable

    get_coverage_wcs() gains the Flemish digital elevation model (DHMV) as a source, with a vignette showing the query pattern. One more service folded into the same interface, which is how this package grows.

    View source ↗
  3. 2y ago

    WMS and WMTS shorthands plus projection distortion utilities

    Adds the add_wms_*() and add_wmts_*() families as shorthands for fully specified leaflet tile calls, along with utilities for calculating distance distortion in projections. It establishes the package's pattern of wrapping verbose service calls in short ones.

    View source ↗