googleVis 0.2.17 is released: Displaying earth quake data

The next version of the googleVis package has been released on the project site and CRAN.

This version provides updates to the package vignette and a new example for the gvisMerge function. The new sections of the vignette have been featured on this blog in more detail earlier:

• Using googleVis with knitr (Link to post)
  
• Using Rook with googleVis (Link to post)
  
• Using Reduce with gvisMerge to display several charts on a page (Link to post)
  

• Data frames with one row only were not displayed in a chart. Thanks to Oliver Jay and Wai Tung Ho for reporting this issue.
  
• The example in the gvisGeoChart help file, which scraps data from http://www.iris.edu/seismon/last30.html to display earth quakes of the last 30 days with magnitude ≥ 4.0, didn’t display the magnitude correctly. The variable Mag was read as a factor rather than numeric. Thanks to Jason Law, who highlighted this point. Here is the now working example.
  

## Plot world wide earth quakes of the last 30 days with magnitude >= 4.0 
library(XML)
library(googleVis)
## Get earthquake data of the last 30 days
eq <- readHTMLTable(readLines("http://www.iris.edu/seismon/last30.html"),
 colClasses=c("factor", rep("numeric", 4), "factor"), which=2)
## Create a lat:long location variable
eq$loc=paste(eq$LAT, eq$LON, sep=":")
## Create a geo chart
G <- gvisGeoChart(eq, "loc", "DEPTH km", "MAG",
                   options=list(displayMode="Markers", 
                   colorAxis="{colors:['purple', 'red', 'orange', 'grey']}",
                   backgroundColor="lightblue"), chartid="EQ")
## Display geo chart in local web browser
fn <- plot(G)
## You find the HTML file fn here
fn

Setting the region argument to 'IR' highlights the recent (11 August 2012) earth quake in north-west Iran near Tabriz and Ahar, which caused the death of hundreds and injured thousands.