Tools for reading and handling spatial objects
Nicholas J. Lewin-Koh and Roger Bivand, contributions by Edzer J. Pebesma, David Forrest, Patrick Giraudoux, Duncan Golicher, Virgilio Gómez Rubio, Patrick Hausmann, Thomas Jagger and Sebastian P. Luque
spatstat, PBSmapping, maps, gpclib, RArcInfo
Set of tools for manipulating and reading geographic data, in particular ESRI shapefiles; C code used from shapelib. The package also provides interface wrappers for exchanging spatial objects with packages such as PBSmapping, spatstat, maps, RArcInfo, Stata tmap, WinBUGS, Mondrian, and others.
GPL version 2 or later (R and interface code), MIT (shapelib code)