Fortification of the hyperSpec R Package

The hyperSpec (http://hyperspec.r-forge.r-project.org/) package allows R users a suite of utilities for manipulating spectroscopic data. These utilities currently include functions for importing spectroscopic data (e.g., Raman, IR, NIR, UV/VIS), plotting, and preprocessing and wrangling spectroscopic objects (i.e., hyperSpec objects) so that they can be easily integrated with commonly used statistical analysis packages (e.g., plsr and MASS). On the one hand, the usefulness of the hyperSpec package for spectroscopic research is clear and immediately useful to R programmers and practitioners of bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and medical statistics. On the other hand, the infrastructure afforded by hyperSpec has led to various dependencies on other R packages, large amounts of test data, and more than a hundred .R files. Accordingly, the current state of the package has become difficult to maintain and vulnerable to fixes related to dependencies on deprecated packages. Thus, the project Fortification of the hyperSpec R Package aims to tackle these issues through distilling, shielding, and bridging the hyperSpec ecosystem.