Hi All,

I have a couple of comments here.  I'm working on some S4 classes for
spatiotemporal data, basically extending Spatial, and I would like to
include some metadata sooner or later.  I wrote some functions to get data
off of webpages (like spatiotemporal ozone data from the EPA's air
explorer), and I wanted to somehow encode this origin of the data into the
object, so I thought a metadata object would be one way to do this.

My very first go was something like this:

setClass("stMetadata",
         representation(title="character",
                        url="character",
                        creator="character",
                        contact="character",
                        description="character"
                        ))


Other things that I think ought to be in there are units of observations (eg
ozone in ppm), units of spatial data (eg northing/easting, lat/long,
Dorsey?),  temporal periodicity (eg daily, weekly, hourly, etc), and perhaps
something about data range (is this a subset of a larger set? what are the
temporal/spatial bounds, etc).

Anyhow, those are some of the thoughts I have.  Of course, it's much easier
to do this when you are using scripts to create data sets than to try to
convince a hurried user to fill out yet another form when all they want to
do is "one simple thing"....

Thoughts?
Blair

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

