Hi As previously mentioned I am working on 3D and 4D spatial classes. To get things compatible with the other sp-classes I would like to ask for your opinion what would be the most suitable bbox methods for Spatial3dArrays and Spatial4dArrays.
My first thought was that bbox should return the 2D geographical extent of the object. This to comply with other spatial methods. For the 3D case an additional slot, btime is added to show the temporal extent of the object. As writing the 4D case, I started wondering whether it would be wise to stick to this (my conclusion at the moment is yes). In that case a new slot called zextent could be added. To retrieve the extent of the different dimensions one would have three functions; bbox(), btime(), and zextent() The other option is to make a bbox slot as a list. bbox() would still return x-y extent, while bbox.full() could return a list of the full extent: list(bbox = matrix(c(1,1,4,4), 2,2, dimnames = list(c("long", "lat"), c("min", "max"))), btime = matrix(c("2002-01-01 06:00:00", "2002-01-01 06:00:00"), 1, 2, dimnames = list(c("time"), c("min", "max"))), zextent = matrix(c(512, 1024), 1,2, dimnames = list(c("masl"), c("min", "max")))) Since bbox is defined as a matrix in Spatial, this would be a bad idea. So, at best bbox could be a matrix of min/max of x, y, and z (since they all are numeric). bbox() would then return a x, y subset of bbox(), while bbox.full() could return a list(xyz, time). Any comments on what would be best suitable to be compatible with the other Spatial classes? Best wishes Torleif PhD candidate Centre for International Health Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research University of Bergen Norway _______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo@stat.math.ethz.ch https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo