valvaletl/smmt

R tool to get municipality mapping table between two time points for Swiss municipalities

Swiss Municipality Data Merger Tool

Introduction

The SMMT is an R Package which helps merge municipal level data sets available for different points in time.

If you ever worked with Swiss municipal-level data, you almost certainly encountered the issue that the municipal state of your dataset is not the one you desired. E.g. it’s not the actual municpial state or it does not match the state of a second dataset.

This R package helps to bring the municipal states together.

A good starting point is this vignette article.

The Swiss Municipal Data Merger Tool automatically detects these mutations and maps municipalities over time, i.e. municipalities of an old state to municipalities of a new state. This functionality is helpful when working with datasets that are based on different spatial references like for example Swiss voting data.

Installation

# Install released version from CRAN
install.packages("SMMT")

# Install most recent version from github.
devtools::install_github("ValValetl/SMMT")

Get started

• Read the vignette vignette("manual") / online
• Look up the documentation of ?map_old_to_new_state

Resources

• SMMT on CRAN
• For more background details, see this article in the Swiss Political Science Review.

Further documentation

• eCH-0071 Datenstandard Historisiertes Gemeindeverzeichnis der Schweiz: The Swiss municipal inventory is a well documented data standard which can be consulted at this webpage.

smmt's Issues

Fix links in documentation

Check ob alle Links funktionieren, sonst fixen.

Issue with municipality inventory import

Dear Valentin,
First of all: thanks for developing such a useful package for the scientific community!

I just wanted to use it for the first time and I'm having an issue with the .xml data import from the municipality inventory. When I run the following code (following the example on the SMMT manual page: https://smmt.valentinknechtl.ch/articles/manual.html#setup), I get an error message:

library(SMMT)
path_inventory_xml <- download_municipality_inventory(path = getwd())

The error message is "Error in if (!copy_success) stop(paste0("XML File already exists at target (", :
the condition has length > 1"

Despite the error message, an .xml-file appears in the working directory, and I can get into R with the alternative option that is indicated on the webpage, in my case:

file_path_inventory_xml <- "path/to/eCH0071_230101.xml"

However, when I then want to generate the mutations_object through the following line of code
mutations_object <- import_CH_municipality_inventory(file_path = file_path_inventory_xml)
I get another error message: "Error: XML content does not seem to be XML: ''

I'm a bit lost concerning what I'm doing wrong or what the issue is here and help would be much appreciated.
I'm using R version 4.2.2 ((2022-10-31 ucrt) -- "Innocent and Trusting") on a Windows 64-bit machine if that is of any help.
Thanks a lot,
Michael