Before beginning this interactive assignment, be sure to complete this week’s practice lab to become familiar with creating simple map in R. Begin by exploring the different state map data available from a public information site such as The Home of the U.S. Government’s Open Data (Links to an external site.) or one of the other links provided below, or you may use the packages you installed in your lab environment. For this assignment, obtain a state transportation data set for Washington, Nevada, Utah, or Oregon. Extract the data, and create a simple map displaying the information using the techniques you learned in your Week 5 lab exercises. Take a screen shot of the data in R, and post it to the discussion thread. Using your scenario from prior weeks, discuss the potential of this type of Internet-based data mining has on decision-making solutions.

For a large number of publicly available data sets you can use in your charts and graphs, The Home of the U.S. Government’s Open Data (Links to an external site.) is an excellent source to obtain information on many topics including data on state, county, trucking, and transportation. Additional sample sites are provided for various data sets to get you started.

The USGS site has geospatial map data:

Staged Products Directory (Links to an external site.)

State transportation data can be found at these links:

Bureau of Transportation Statistics (Links to an external site.)

Data.gov: Local—Data Catalog