[SoC] [Report #1] Kriging with GRASS and R: v.autokrige port to wxPython and more

[Anne Ghisla]

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Hello all,

I'm Anne Ghisla and I'm working on integration of R kriging functions
into GRASS, porting v.autokrige [0] to wxPython and widening its pool of
functions.
Code is hosted on SVN GRASS addons repository, see the page of the
project on OSGeo wiki for details [1].

= Done =

I dedicated this week to documentation and discussion with users and
developers.
- - Documentation: I'm reading "An introduction to Applied Geostatistics"
[2], as I need to understand the theory behind kriging functions
provided by R. On wxPython side, wxPython wiki is the main source of
information, together with the code of GRASS wxPython interface.
- - Community discussion: Feedback on interface design and R has been
collected on various mailing lists, mainly in this thread [3]. Also, a
group of Portuguese ArcGIS users is interested in giving advice and test
the new module.

= Planned for next week =

I plan to define which functions (and consequently which R packages) are
to be included into the module. I plan to first include package automap
(a wrapper for gstat), then gstat advanced functions, then geoR (an
"ecological vicariant" of gstat), all alvailable on CRAN [4] . This will
allow R users to keep using their preferred functions, as kriging
results are implementation-dependent.
Then I'll work on wxPython interface and get a draft as soon as
possible. The interfaces that I use as model are ArcGIS' kriging module
and Isatis. I won't replicate their structure, rather see what are the
provided features and create v.autokrige interface following Humane
Interface guidelines.

= Bottleneck(s) =

I'm experiencing some difficulties, mainly with wxPython, as I never
used it before, and also with kriging, for the same reason :) but I'm
not worried nor blocked. Last year GSoC project was a bet and I
succeeded, this year it's even harder but I can rely on some more
experience and, as always, on mentor and community support.

best regards and happy coding to everyone!

Anne

[0] http://precisiongis.blogspot.com/2008/11/vautokrige.html
[1] http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/V.autokrige_GSoC_2009
[2] "An introduction to Applied Geostatistics", E. H. Isaaks and R. M
Srivastava, 1989.
[3] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2009-May/005786.html
[4] http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html
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