Spatiotemporal data representation in R

Abstract

Recent advances in devices that collect geospatial information have produced massive spatiotemporal data sets. Earth observation and GPS satellites, sensor networks and mobile gadgets are examples of technologies that have created large data sets with better spatial and temporal resolution than ever. This scenario brings a challenge for Geoinformatics: we need software tools to represent, process and analyze these large data sets efficiently. R is a environment widely used for data analysis. In this work, we present a study of spatiotemporal data representation in R. We evaluate R packages to access and create three spatiotemporal data types as different views on the same observation set: time series, trajectories and coverage.