Calculate the distance between two points of two datasets (nearest neighbor)

What about writing a function that looks for the nearest waterfeature for every person?

#requires function earth.dist from "fossil" package
require(fossil)

#load data
persons = read.csv("person.csv", header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
water = read.csv("water.csv", header =TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

#Generate unique coordinates dataframe
UniqueCoordinates <- data.frame(unique(persons[,4:5]))
UniqueCoordinates$Id <- formatC((1:nrow(UniqueCoordinates)), width=3,flag=0)


#Generate a function that looks for the closest waterfeature for each id coordinates
NearestW <- function(id){
   tmp <- UniqueCoordinates[UniqueCoordinates$Id==id, 1:2]
   WaterFeatures <- rbind(tmp,water[,2:3])
   tmp1 <- earth.dist(WaterFeatures, dist=TRUE)[1:(nrow(WaterFeatures)-1)]
   tmp1 <- min(tmp1)
   tmp1 <- data.frame(tmp1, WaterFeature=tmp)
   return(tmp1)
 }

#apply to each id and the merge
CoordinatesWaterFeature <- ldply(UniqueCoordinates$Id, NearestW)
persons <- merge(persons, CoordinatesWaterFeature, by.x=c(4,5), by.y=c(2,3))

NOTE: I've added a stringsAsFactors parameter to the original read.csv , it make the merging easier at the end

NOTE:Column tmp1 notes the number of METERS to the nearest water feature

Maybe I'm a little too late, but you can use spatstat to compute distances between two different datasets. The command is nncross. The arguments you have to use are two objects of type ppp, which you can create using the as.ppp() function.