Integrating R with ArcGIS

The R Project for Statistical Computing, or simply referred to as R, is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is also a programming language that is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis.

Although there are other programming languages for handling statistics, R has become the de facto language of statistical routines, offering a package repository with over 6,400 problem solving packages. It offers versatile and powerful plotting. It also has the advantage of treating tabular and multidimensional data as a labeled, indexed series of observations.

The R-ArcGIS Bridge is a free, open source R package that connects ArcGIS and R. It was released together with an R ArcGIS community website on GitHub, encouraging collaboration between the two communities. The package serves the following three purposes:

• ArcGIS developers can now create custom tools and toolboxes that integrate ArcGIS and R
• ArcGIS users can access R code through geoprocessing scripts
• R users can access GIS data managed in traditional GIS ways

This book incudes an introductory chapter on the R language along with a chapter detailing the installation of the R?-ArcGIS Bridge and the creation of custom ArcGIS script tools using R. Using R with ArcGIS Bridge enables the creation of custom ArcGIS tools that will connect GIS data sources, such as feature classes to create statistical output from the R programming language, as shown in the following screenshot: