Obversive Wiki - View Source: ProblemStatement

!!! Introduction

The R project (http://www.r-project.org) is a very well designed system for doing statistical (and other) forms of analysis.  The system is designed as a programming language with a rudimentary "command line" style interface for the user.

While R is a very powerful language, the "command line" interface can be daunting to new users.  Users are expected to learn the programming language and interact with the system by typing in small pieces of code or developing full scripts.  This works very well for individuals with the proper background in programming and statistics, or those who need to learn R for their profession.  These users love R once they learn it and feel that the standard interface is more than enough, occaisionally using Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) if they need.

!!! Project Rationale

The ObveRsive project was started in an attempt to build an interface targetted at non-programmer users.  The users we envision using ObveRsive are people who need the power of R as a computational analysis engine, but do not have the time nor the inclination to learn the details of the language.  The intention is to provide an interface that not only helps perform specific actions easily, but can also help the user to learn the R language as they use the ObveRsive front-end.