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

[Tim Keitt]

I agree, the package is a great foundation for building a richer spatial
analysis framework. I'm nit-picking about the name. Not a real
complaint. Mostly I'm thinking right now about the class relationships.
We need to get that right. This is a very good start. I may suggest some
very minor tweaks. Overall, I like the layout.

THK

On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 17:42 +0200, Martin Maechler wrote:
> >>>>> "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