[GRASSLIST:650] Re: running r.topmodel

[Hamish]

Wouter:
> > Just to say that I'm now one of the topmodel developers at
> > Lancaster. We are doing a major cleanup of the code and intend to
> > release some new versions soon, although in R rather than in GRASS
> > (for several reasons...) incorporating Monte Carlo and other stuff.

Tom:
> That's excellent; the choice of going to R is pretty interesting. Does
> this mean the Glue algorithms will be ported there as well?

Wouter:
> I chose R primarily for uncertainty analysis: in R it is very easy to
> pull parameters from whatever probability distribution you want,
> construct a  parameter matrix and do a Monte Carlo run over the whole
> matrix. Similarly, you can feed the modelling results directly to
> whatever likelihood function that is available (or that can be
> programmed) in R.
> 
> As a result, it should be quite straightforward to use a GLUE approach
> within this framework...


Each tool belongs where it is best suited, so if that means R or GMT or
Matlab, and not in GRASS, then fine with me. I think it is a good thing
to make GRASS easily modular with these other great softwares.

We now have a pretty functional way of calling up GRASS 6 data from in
R, I think what we need now is a good way of access R from within GRASS.
i.e. a GRASS shell script could be a wrapper to send data to R, tell R
to do something special with it, then automatically bring the final
product back into GRASS. This would open up a lot of the really good
geostat, interpolation, etc., fns already written for R to GRASS users
who are not R experts, and would also make it very easy to write new &
powerful GRASS scripts using R algorithms (eg wrapper script for new
topmodel).

What needs to happen?


Hamish