convertOSMTimezones: Convert OSM timezone shapefile
In MazamaSpatialUtils: Spatial Data Download and Utility Functions

convertOSMTimezones

R Documentation

Convert OSM timezone shapefile

Description

Create a simple features data frame for world timezones.

The full resolution file will be named "OSMTimezones.rda". In addition, "_05", _02" and "_01" versions of the file will be created that that are simplified to 5%, 2% and 1%. Simplified versions will greatly improve the speed of both searching and plotting.

Usage

convertOSMTimezones()

Details

A world timezone shapefile is downloaded and converted to a simple features data frame with additional columns of data. The resulting file will be created in the spatial data directory which is set with setSpatialDataDir().

There are 2 timezones which have polygons but the associated rows in the dataframe have no data. These timezones also have no countryCode assigned. We hope to rectify this in a future release. These are the missing timezones:

> OSMTimezones$timezone[is.na(OSMTimezones$countryCode)]
 [1] "America/Nuuk"  "Asia/Qostanay"

Value

Name of the datasetName being created.

Note

From the source documentation:

This project aims to stay up-to-date with all of the currently valid timezones that are defined in the timezone database. This project also will attempt to provide the most accurate possible boundaries of timezones according to community input.

The underlying data is downloaded from OpenStreetMap via the overpass turbo API. Various boundaries are assembled together to produce each zone with various geographic operations. In numerous edge cases arbitrary boundaries get created in various zones which are noted in the timezones.json file.

To maintain consistency with the timezone database, this project will only create a new release after the timezone database creates a new release. If there are no new timezones created or deleted in a timezone database release, then this project will only create a release if there have been changes performed to the boundary definitions of an existing zone within this project.