send to: [email protected]
Dear OSGeo Incubation Committee,
We would like to apply, as the 'R-Spatial' community, to become an OSGeo affiliated organisation.
We are a diverse group with a shared interest in developing free and open tools for the reproducible analysis of geographic data. R is a popular and rapidly growing language for statistical computing and 'data science'. It is already part of the OSGeo ecosystem: the OSGeo Live distribution ships with R and R integrates with established OSGeo projects such as GRASS GIS, SAGA and QGIS. R tutorials (which would benefit from being updated) are listed on the tutorials listed on OSGeo's old website. We would like to update existing content and create new OSGeo-affiliated tutorials for using R-Spatial software. Many R-Spatial projects have support from the R Consortium, opening the possibility of stronger links between R and OSGeo at an organisational level.
After a discussion on our GitHub Organisation at github.com/r-spatial, it is clear that closer links could be mutually beneficial. Collaboration is at the heart of open source software and the R community has a long history. The history of R-GRASS GIS bridges, for example, covers more than 20 years and goes in both directions. R interfaces enable a wide range of people to access OSGeo-supported software from a reproducible command-line interface.
Continued development and innovation in R-OSGeo links are illustrated the qgisprocess package, which motivated positive changes in the QGIS source code (see github.com/paleolimbot/qgisprocess/issues/21). The R-Spatial community relies on the OSGeo projects GDAL, PROJ and GEOS for data access and geographic operations. Core R-Spatial packages sf, raster and terra use bindings to the libraries for much of the heavy lifting and many thousands of people using R for spatial research (often without knowing) run OSGeo support code every day. We would like to support the ongoing work of these vital components of the wider community that is represented by the OSGeo-affiliated conference series FOSS4G. We also anticipate benefits from being part of the wider OSGeo community and would like to be more active members of the wider movement advocating free and open source software for geospatial.
'R-Spatial' can be loosely defined as the ecosystem of code, projects and people using R for working with and adding value to spatial data. A manifestation of the wider R-Spatial community is the friendly, vibrant and diverse range of voices using the #rspatial tag on Twitter. For the purposes of OSGeo supported software projects however, we define R-Spatial as the packages found at https://github.com/r-spatial/ (which includes sf, stars, mapview, gstat, spdep and many other popular packages for working with spatial data) and https://github.com/rspatial/ (which includes packages raster and terra). A (possibly incomplete) list with R packages that directly link to OSGEO libraries is found here. Thousands of R packages depend on these packages one way or another.
We would like to initiate the process needed for R-Spatial to eventually become an OSGeo community project, by achieving the first two of the three steps as outlined on the Incubation Committee web page:
- We would like to create an OSGeo web page with information about key packages in the 'R-spatial stack', including how they relate to OSGeo projects
- We would like to become an OSGeo Community Project
All the best,
R-Spatial developers and contributors, including: Robin Lovelace, Roger Bivand, Edzer Pebesma, Tim Appelhans, Robert Hijmans, Jakub Nowosad, Nick Bearman, Emmanuel Blondel, Andy Teucher, Marynia Kolak, Timothée Giraud, Ahmadou Dicko, Andrea Gilardi, Lorena Abad, Martijn Tennekes