[R-sig-Geo] sp: a package with classes and methods for spatial data in R

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Edzer" == Edzer J Pebesma <e.pebesma at geo.uu.nl>
>>>>>     on Fri, 15 Apr 2005 15:59:17 +0200 writes:

    Edzer> Tim Keitt wrote:
    >> Very cool. I'd been thinking of something similar, but not had the time
    >> to act on it. Looks like we need to add OGR wrappers to rgdal so that
    >> vector data can be read in.
    >> 
    >> 
    Edzer> I think Barry has been there with Rmaps. It would
    Edzer> be nice to integrate this functionality into rgdal, because OGR
    Edzer> is part of rgdal, and the external-library dependence is still,
    Edzer> well, a bit clumsy for R under Windows.

    >> A couple of immediate items I noticed:
    >> 
    >> 1) "sp" is rather terse, no? I like more descriptive package names.
    >> 
    >> 
    Edzer> Yes. Think of ts for time series. We thought of "spatial", but
    Edzer> that name has been taken long ago. sp is the first two letters
    Edzer> in spdep, splancs, spproj, ... Other suggestions, please?

Actually, I have liked the "conciseness" of 'sp'
(when I first heard about it from Roger quite a while ago):

It should become *the* basic spatial class infrastructure
package.  Hence it makes sense to emphasize its importance by
attributing a `top level' name.

Martin