st: RE: Point-to-Polygon in Stata

["William Buchanan" <william@williambuchanan.net>]

Hi Jeremy,

If the code that the developer provided is too difficult/complex to easily
interpret, then it might be easier to work within the context of more
specialized programs.  I'm not sure if your university has any access to
student trials of ArcGIS (when I took that route the license was good for
exactly 365 days), but there are other alternatives.  For example, you could
try Quantum GIS (http://www.qgis.org/) or GRASS GIS
(http://grass.osgeo.org/), both of which are free/open source.  I can't
claim that they are all that easy to get up and running with, but ArcGIS
wasn't exactly the easiest program to learn either; in my specific case, I
was using the GIS software to merge data based on a 5 mile buffer around
selected points.  I suspect you would have a much easier time doing things
within the context of one of those programs and exporting the data from the
process you are trying to use and importing it into Stata for analyses.

HTH,
Billy

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
[mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Jeremy Wells
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 7:21 AM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: st: Point-to-Polygon in Stata

Hi all,

I have been using Dr. Pisati's fun spmap program, but I have run into a bit
of a snag.

I have a dataset of about 76,000 observations, coded by latitude/longitude,
in one country. I also have the coordinate file for the country produced by
shp2dta that includes the country's provinces. I would like to add a
variable to the dataset that codes each observation with the region from the
coordinate file, which is essentially a point-to-polygon operation.

I have tried to find a way to doing this, including this
(http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2008-10/msg00817.html)
from Dr. Pisati, but I am not at all sure how to apply the code. (Plus, this
was written five years ago, so surely there is something that has been
developed and is a little easier to use!)

Thanks for your consideration! Please limit the responses to Stata-only
applications as I do not have access to expensive GIS software.

Jeremy Wells
Ph.D. Student
LSU Dept. of Poli. Sci.
324 Stubbs Hall
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

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