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arcgisplaces

arcgisplaces is an R package to interface with ArcGIS Places Service.

The places service is a ready-to-use location service that can search for businesses and geographic locations around the world. It allows you to find, locate, and discover detailed information about each place.

In order to use arcgisplaces you will need an ArcGIS Developers account. Get started here.

Installation

You can install a binary of the development version of arcgisplaces from r-universe with:

install.packages("arcgisplaces", repos = "https://r-arcgis.r-universe.dev")

You will also need the development version of {arcgisutils}

if (!requireNamespace("pak")) install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("r-arcgis/arcgisutils")

Building from source

Or, you can install the development version from GitHub. Note the development version requires an installation of Rust. See rustup for instructions to install Rust.

if (!requireNamespace("pak")) install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("r-arcgis/arcgisplaces")

Usage

Finding places:

Understanding categories:

  • categories(): find categories by name or ID.

  • category_details(): get detailed information about the categories returned from categories().

  • Find place attributes such as name, address, description, opening hours, price ratings, user ratings, and social links.

Examples

arcgisutils is needed for authentication. The Places API supports either using an API key via auth_key() or one generated via OAuth2 using either auth_client() or auth_code(). See the Places API documentation for more.

library(arcgisutils)
library(arcgisplaces)

# Authenticate with a Developer Account API Key
token <- auth_key()
set_arc_token(token)

You can search for places near a location with near_point().

coffee <- near_point(x = -122.334, y = 47.655, search_text = "Coffee")
coffee

Locations are returned as an sf object with the place ID, the place name, distance from the search point, a character vector of categories.

[!TIP]

arcgisplaces will return an sf object, but the sf package is not required to work with the package. The sf print method will not be used unless the package is loaded. If package size is a consideration—i.e. deploying an app in a Docker container—consider using wk or rsgeo.

Details for the places can be fetched using place_details(). The possible fields are documented online as well as contained in the exported vector fields. Because pricing is dependent upon which fields are requested, it is a required argument.

To get the add requested_fields = "hours". Note, that the other possible fields will still be present in the result, but completely empty.

details <- place_details(
  coffee$place_id,
  requested_fields = "rating",
  .progress = FALSE # remove progress bar
)

details[c("price", "user")]

Or, you can search for places within a bounding box using within_extent(). This could be quite handy for searching within current map bounds, for example.

bakeries <- within_extent(
  -70.356, 43.588, -70.176, 43.7182,
  category_id = "13002"
)

bakeries[c("name")]