R/GRASS - statistics/GIS - interface

[Roger Bivand]

I would like to announce the release of an early R/GRASS interface for
GRASS raster and site data to and from the R statistical data analysis
language. It has been developed for GRASS 5.0b5 and R 0.99.0a, and will be
advanced to track developments in both packages. Both are GPL, GRASS an
open source GIS, and R a powerful relative of the S language. Links can be
found on:

http://www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/statsgrasslist.html

The current files are GRASS-0.1-1.tar.gz, bundled as a standard R
contributed package with manual pages and examples - do 'R INSTALL
GRASS-0.1-1.tar.gz' to install, and 'R CMD check GRASS' within GRASS to
test after initialising a test location in GRASS, and a gzipped pdf
version of a submitted paper describing how the interface works
(paper2.pdf.gz).

I would be grateful for indications as to whether the interface fills a
gap, and how it should be improved. GRASS 5.0b6 has just been released,
and R 1.0.0 is due 29 Febuary, so the next version will be coming shortly
afterwards.

It is worth noting that the package contains wrapper functions for some R
geostatistical and spatial point pattern functions.

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Geography, 
Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration,
Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 93 93
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no