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sftime

ANALYTICS
Velocity0.0

time extension to sf objects. Contribute to r-spatial/sftime development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com/r-spatial/sftime ↗

The spatiotemporal companion to sf, moving at the pace of the packages around it.

spatiotemporalr-spatialinteroperabilitytidyverse-integrationr-package
◆Current state
sftime extends sf with an active time column, giving R a data frame class for data that is both spatial and temporal. Its recent history is almost entirely integration work: 0.3.0 added conversion methods from spatstat point patterns, sftrack and sftraj movement objects and cubble data frames, plus dedicated tidyr::drop_na() and dplyr::dplyr_reconstruct() methods. The two releases since are a namespace version-check correction and a switch from the magrittr pipe to the native pipe in examples.
◆Where it's heading
The package's job is to be interoperable, so its releases follow whatever the surrounding spatial and tidyverse packages do. The dplyr_reconstruct() work is the clearest example of why that matters: inheriting sf's method caused column binding to silently return an sf object where an sftime object was expected, which is the kind of class-preservation bug that only surfaces two steps downstream. Development is sparse, roughly one release a year.
◆Prediction
Expect further conversion methods as new spatiotemporal classes appear in the R spatial ecosystem, and continued tracking of dplyr and tidyr generics. The entries do not indicate any planned change to the sftime class itself.

◆Recent moves

  1. 3mo ago

    Examples switched to the native R pipe

    Documentation-only modernisation, replacing the magrittr pipe with the native pipe in examples and vignettes. No code change.

    View source ↗
  2. 11mo ago

    Fixes the cubble namespace version check

    Corrects a requireNamespace version argument in the cubble conversion method added in 0.3.0. A one-line follow-up to the previous release's interoperability work.

    View source ↗
  3. 1y ago

    Converts from spatstat, sftrack and cubble objects

    The substantive release in this window: conversion methods from spatstat point patterns, sftrack and sftraj movement objects and cubble data frames, which is how sftime becomes a common destination for spatiotemporal data rather than a separate island. A dedicated dplyr_reconstruct() method also fixes a class-preservation bug where column binding returned an sf object instead of an sftime one.

    View source ↗