Define aliases in shapefiles

Dear useRs,

I am searching for a way to break the 10 character limit of the field names
in shapefiles created using for example the writeOGR function from the
rgdal package.

On way could be to define aliases for field names, but I am not aware of a
function allowing me to do that.

Are aliases an ArcGIS thing for shapefile names? I can only see vague
references on the internet to something like that. Do you create field
name aliases in ArcGIS? Are they saved with the shapefile or with the
ArcGIS file? Do you get a foo.shp.xml file that is keeping this extra
metadata around? Perhaps we could reverse-engineer that and create it
in R.

 Standards-compliant shapefiles can only have 10-character field names.

 You could use another file format, such as GML or Spatialite, as long
as whatever you are saving these for can read them.

Barry