How to determine if feature A and B are located in the same room?

Question

I have created a map using MapWindows like the following:

A little explanation here, the is a map of an elderly home. The yellow boxes are room and the white rectangles inside the yellow boxes are the beds.

I have a few things that need to be done using QGIS (preferably integrated with R so that I can automate the process):

1. I need to check whether the beds are "appropriately" placed in the room. For example, in the "lower-left quadrant" room, the "upper-right quadrant" bed is place outside the boundary of the room, this is not appropriate and I need to fix it.

2. I need to count how many beds are there in one room. Can I do it in GIS/R?

3. I need to know if a particular bed is in the same room as another particular bed.

I have about 40 maps and a total of >2000 beds, I can't do the 3 things above manually. I wonder if some mechanical means can help.

I am using MapWindows for creating the maps, QGIS for visualization, and R for data processing (checking the dbf files for the naming of the beds, creation of csv files for giving "information" for each bed). I wonder if the 3 tools will be sufficient for the 3 tasks above.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can do all this with R, using the rgeos package to check for overlapping geometries for (1); to count geometries within geometries for (2); and to test which geometries are within other geometries for (3).

Obviously a simple R loop can do this for however many data sets you've got.

A trickier problem would be automatically fixing the problems spotted by (1), but maybe you won't have many of these and its enough for R to flag them up for you to manually edit them in Qgis.