[R-sig-Geo] Geos library

[Timothy H. Keitt]

On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 12:54, Edzer J. Pebesma wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yes, this is a key point. R could be converted into a pretty good GIS
platform, but how many would use it? Perhaps better is to hook R into a
client like UDIG (http://udig.refractions.net/). I'm imagining opening a
UDIG session for spatial preprocessing and then attaching an R session
with access to the UDIG data structures for model fitting. Of course,
one would still need proxy classes covering the geotools api.

T.

> 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!
> 
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-- 
Timothy H. Keitt
Section of Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin
http://www.keittlab.org/