cleangeo provides utilities to clean geometries from
spatial objects in R. If you aim to do geoprocessing in R, this package
will help you in cleaning your Spatial* objects before, and
avoid geoprocessing errors later.
sfThe_ cleangeo package was developed in 2015 at at time where
sp and rgeos, maptools, raster, etc.
were among R solutions to deal with spatial data handling. With the
increase of sf instead of sp objects, it’s recommended
to switch progressively to sf as base for handling spatial
features, and to use sf::st_make_valid to validate
geometries (which is now the default in cleangeo). Following the
archiving of rgeos, maptools, it is probable that
cleangeo may also be archived.
Native geometry fixing strategies, although applicable in some cases, do not cover the full typology of geometry issues we may find with vector data. Although refactored to remove the dependency with rgeos and maptools, some unexpected behaviors can be found.
With the progress done on validating geometries, especially with
sf, the default strategy to fix geometries in cleangeo
has now been switched to the use of sf::st_make_valid.
Nonetheless, although the original set-up and actual name of
sf refers to an ISO/OGC specification (Simple
Features), users that handle geospatial data with tools that rely on the
ISO/OGC realm (most of GIS tools, from the OsGeo or even
proprietary software) should use sf
cautiously as the default behavior doesn’t rely anymore
on the ISO/OGC realm for managing geographic coordinates (it was
initially) but on a non-standard technology-specific geometry model
handled with s2 (from the name of the library developed by
Google). To turn off this default set-up, and to conserve legacy
behaviors (backward-compatibility) in geospatial processes, users will
need to ensure they use sf::sf_use_s2(FALSE). This is
particularly needed if you grab data from OGC data services (eg. with
ows4R), and related OGC formats that do not rely on the
s2 data model, but on the ISO/OGC Simple Features data
model.
We thank in advance people that use cleangeo for citing
it in their work / publication(s). For this, please use the citation
provided at this link
Some projects using cleangeo: