[R-sig-Geo] Spatial data tower of babel

[Barry Rowlingson]

Hi,

 Recently while teaching at SFU I hit the problem that infects R when
many people work on similar projects - the multitude of data formats
for similar data. The sp project was partly an attempt to give a
standard format for spatial data but its widespread non-use in older
packages causes trouble.

 So for example I taught the students all about 'sp' objects, and then
they had to use spatstat and splancs for some point-process stuff,
then geoR for some kriging, none of which use sp objects.

 So I figured maybe we need a whole load of 'as' functions that can
convert between the various spatial data formats (there are more in
CRAN, I am sure) to help us all out on this. Some of these functions
may already exist, indeed I just found something about converting
fairly raw x-y coordinate objects to SpatialPolygons hidden away in
the SpatialEpi package (polygons2spatial.polygons).

 Would it be a good idea to stick all the conversions we can think of
into a single package, "spBabel" say (or spConversion to avoid any
cultural reference), so people have a one-stop shop? And if we find
routines stuck in other packages (such as polygons2spatial.polygons)
we rip them out and bundle them?

 Yes, its a matter of time and effort and we're all busy, but I'd like
to put it out as a proposal. It might make a nice intern or GSOC
project, but we're a bit late for that, so maybe if anyone has a PhD
student starting who needs to get up to speed with R packages and
spatial data it would be a good introduction for them. Once its all
set up (on R-forge or similar) contributing shouldn't be a problem.

 Okay, that's my one crazy idea for the day done.

Barry


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