I used to combine R with GRASS 5 using GRASS package(CRAN), today when surffing the net, i find that spgrass6, the interface between R and GRASS 6, released on Feb 1, 2007. in my view R could  finally play a vital role in this latest Open Source GIS software.

you could find more details by the reference manual, and meanwhile, the last chapter of the paper, GRASS 6 in a nutshell (y Markus Neteler),  will give you  a quick  introducation.

The interface between GRASS and R statistical language (R) is currently undergoing significant changes (Bivand, 2005). The new design is embedded in the new efforts to develop coherent spatial classes for R. The basic website for the new GRASS interface is hosted at SourceForge (http://r-spatial.sourceforge.net). The new package is named “spgrass6”. The basic spatial object classes are maintained in the “sp” package. The additional “spGDAL” class is a wrapper for functions in the “rgdal” package, which interfaces to the GDAL library. Another package is “spmaptools”, which is an interface to the SHAPE library.

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