Edzer Pebesma
University of Münster - Germany
Edzer Pebesma is professor in geoinformatics and co-director of the Institute for Geoinformatics of the University of Münster. He is an active member of the R community, and maintains several R extension packages that play a key role in enabling R as a platform for handling and analyzing spatial and spatiotemporal data. He actively promotes the use of open source software for scientific purposes, and tries to contribute to open science by developing tools that help scientists create reproducible and executable papers. He is currently co-editor-in-chief for Computers & Geosciences and for the independent, open access Journal of Statistical Software, and associate editor for Spatial Statistics.
May 10, 2017 11:15 - 12:00
Why do scientists write, and share scientific software? Writing and sharing scientific software is a means to communicate scientific ideas for finding scientific concensus, no more and no less than writing and sharing scientific papers is. Important factors for successful communication are agreeing on an open source license, technological solutions to sharing development, using a language that is understood by many, a system of peer review that fosters evolution and diversity, and sufficient possibility for contributors to be recognized as individual, and awarded. This talk will discuss all these items mostly in the light of the ecosystem of R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, which is largely driven by academics.