countryatlas (Q7368848)

A complete toolkit for getting country data onto honest maps. Country names rarely line up across data sources ("US", "U.S.", "United States", "United States of America" are one country, but a naive join treats them as four), so 'countryatlas' makes ISO codes the universal join key. It generalises a one-call, map-ready table that stitches together 'ggplot2' map geometry, 'WDI' World Bank indicators and the 'countrycode' Rosetta stone; exposes the join machinery for the user's own data; ships curated reference data (metadata, group memberships, an indicator catalogue, flags and currencies); adds analysis helpers (per-capita, regional roll-ups, ranking, inequality and convergence statistics); and turns one hand-drawn choropleth into a full vocabulary of projected, area-honest maps (binned and quantile choropleths, proportional-symbol, spike, bivariate, value-by-alpha, cartogram, tile-grid, flow, small-multiple, animated, globe and interactive), and can hand its curated, ISO-reconciled tables to 'ggsql' for database-side spatial rendering. Honesty is treated as a feature rather than a slogan: classification methods can be compared side by side, missing data can be hatched rather than greyed, coverage and provenance travel with the plot, and the distortion each projection introduces can be measured and drawn. Heavy spatial dependencies stay optional, and a bundled offline snapshot lets every example, test and vignette run without the network.