R Spatial and GIS Interoperability for Ethnic, Linguistic and Religious Diversity Analysis in Romania

Abstract

Diversity aspects, particularly ethnic, linguistic and religious ones, have become global, capturing a large interest in being extremely sensitive recently. Traditionally, these had been issues concerning only particular countries and/or regions, due to specific historical conditions. The recent waves of mass migration towards the wealthier countries rose great problems regarding populations which come with radically different ethnic, linguistic and religious background compared to the local population. Our research is focused on analysing ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity in Romania, at Local Administrative Units level (LAU2), along with the segregation analysis regarding the same aspects at county (NUTS3) and region levels (NUTS2) by integrating R processing flexibility with and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) presentation abilities. R programming language offers support for developing integrated analysis solutions, based on specialized packages for computing diversity/segregation indices, in connection with packages that allow processing and visualising data geospatially, through interoperability with popular GIS, such as ArcGIS and QGIS. It is Romania census data that is employed as data source for analysis, with a focus on the latest census data from 2011.

Keywords

• R
• GIS
• Interoperability
• Diversity Analysis
• Segregation Analysis