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

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 1:53 PM, Edzer Pebesma
<edzer.pebesma at uni-muenster.de> wrote:
> Barry, what exactly did you try out before you posted?
>
> Your claim is not completely true: geoR has a function
> as.geodata.SpatialPointsDataFrame, so you can do, for instance:
>
> library(geoR)
> data(meuse) # from sp
> coordinates(meuse) = ~x+y
> krige.bayes(as.geodata(meuse, "zinc"))
>
> and its locations argument can be a SpatialPoints object.

Well, I didnt claim these functions didnt exist, nor did I point out
that some are trivial - ie to get from a SpatialPointsDataFrame to a
set of locations for, say, splancs' K-function, you just do
coordinates(foo). What I was hoping for was that we could create a
single point where these conversions could be collected, which would
be an almost authoritative source of conversions.

 geoR has SpatialPointsDataFrame to geodata - but does it have the
other way round too? Or is that in sp? It doesn't matter too much,
since students will find them either way, but does
as.sp(as.geodata('meuse","zinc")) get you back where you started?
That's what students may expect. Conversion is a big headache for new
users and anything that makes it easier is a plus. Imagine doing
vignette(spBabel) and getting a whole list of what formats can be
converted together with caveats and restrictions - sounds good to me.

 Obviously the problems are in maintainance and keeping conversions up
to date with any changes in the format in the main package, as well as
that this package would probably depend on all the other packages...

  Idle coffee-time thoughts...

Barry