I should have been much more specific with my question and supplied an example. In the meantime I believe I found the solution in the PBSmapping package, this time I will provide an example that illustrates what I am trying to achieve:
#Get the boundaries for Manhattan: library(maps); library(PBSmapping); Manhattan <- map('county', 'new york,new york', plot=F); #define a few points in Manhattan and compute the corresponding Voronoi regions: XY <- cbind.data.frame( PID = 1, POS = 1:10, X = c(-73.97220,-73.95456,-73.97906,-73.98685,-73.99968,-73.96716,-73.97127,-73.96524,-73.98322,-74.00587), Y = c(40.74983,40.77402,40.75022,40.73952,40.72842,40.75677,40.75112,40.75513,40.76271,40.74026) ); polys <- calcVoronoi(as.PolySet(XY, projection="LL") ); #plot the Voronoi regions: plotMap(polys) #It would be a much more meaningful plot to clip these Voronoi regions to the Manhattan boundaries: m <- as.PolySet (cbind.data.frame(PID = 1, POS = 1:length(Manhattan$x), X = Manhattan$x, Y = Manhattan$y)) plotMap(joinPolys(m, polys, "INT" ), xlim = Manhattan$range[1:2], ylim = Manhattan$range[3:4]); So the key operation I was looking for was simply the intersection provided by the function (joinPolys(..., "INT" ) from PBSmapping. Thanks again, Markus On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:26 AM, Roger Bivand <roger.biv...@nhh.no> wrote: > On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, Markus Loecher wrote: > > Dear all, >> I apologize if this is too simple a question as it does appear to be a >> basic >> GIS operation but I have not found the appropriate function that performs >> a >> clipping of polygons into boundaries given by a (larger "outer") polygon. >> I >> tried overlay() from package sp and clipPolys from package PBSmapping but >> none converted the "inner" polygons into new ones laying inside the >> boundaries given by the outer polygon. >> > > Maybe a basic GIS operation should be done in a GIS? Otherwise, please feel > free to consult threads on the license problems of gpclib, and about the > R-forge rgeos package. If you'd like to contribute such an intersection (I > think you want the intersection between an arbitrary SpatialPolygons object > and a simple SpatialPolygons object for the outer polygon) function tool to > rgeos, or at least a sketch of how it might work, that would be helpful. > > Roger > > >> Any help would be greatly appreciated, >> Thanks, >> >> Markus >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> >> _______________________________________________ >> R-sig-Geo mailing list >> R-sig-Geo@stat.math.ethz.ch >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo >> >> > -- > Roger Bivand > Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of > Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, > Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43 > e-mail: roger.biv...@nhh.no > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo@stat.math.ethz.ch https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo