[R-sig-Geo] Geos library

[Edzer J. Pebesma]

Hisaji ONO wrote:

> How about using PostGIS which has an interface to GEOS?
>
> And PostGIS's spatial indices has good performance for overlay analysises
>and spatial queries.
>
> And R has a few interfaces to PostgreSQL.
>  
>
There's much to say for this. Maybe the question is whether we want to
implement a GIS or interface to GIS, using R. Of course both is possible,
but who would prefer using R over existing GIS for GIS functionality?
This question needs zooming in wrt different types of functionality.

I've been looking at GEOS in the past, and found it huge and complex.
Interfacing a major part of its functionality will be a large task, and then
running all the tests...

I think one of the first goals -- and we're working on this [1,2,3] -- 
must be
to provide suitable spatial classes, write package support for them so
that packages can use a common spatial data base, and provide convenient
GIS interface and visualisation functions. Of course, visualisation is part
of GIS as well, but then GIS don't have lattice and ... so on.
--
Edzer

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/r-spatial/
[2] http://elearning.maths.lancs.ac.uk:8080/RSpatial/
[3] any help is welcome!