Esri is set to announce an open-source software bridge that makes it faster and easier to move mapping data between ArcGIS and R. The aim is to help R users tap into an organization’s GIS data housed within ArcGIS, a popular platform for high-powered geo-analysis, without the need to generate intermediate files. However, the code will also work to pull in any vector or tabular data supported by ArcGIS — including but not limited to Shapefiles — whether or not that data is stored within ArcGIS.

That software bridge is an R package called arcgisbinding and it’s slated for release today during Esri’s annual user conference in San Diego.

“R developers can quickly access ArcGIS datasets from within R, save R results back to ArcGIS datasets and tables, and easily convert between ArcGIS datasets and their equivalent representations in R,” Esri Chief Scientist Dawn Wright said in an emailed statement.

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