Next Level Web Scraping

The outcome presented above will not be very useful to most of you - still, this could be a good example for what possibly can be done via webscraping in R.

Background: TIRIS is the federal geo-statistical service of North-Tyrol, Austria. One of many great things it provides are historical and recent aerial photographs. These photographs can be addressed via URL's. This is the basis of the script: the URL's are retrieved, some parameters are adjusted, using the customized addresses images are downloaded and animated by saveHTML from the Animation-Package. The outcome (HTML-Animation) enables you to view and skip through aerial photographs of any location in North-Tyrol, from the year 1940 to 2010, and see how the landscape, buildings, etc. have changed...

View the script HERE.