[MetaCRS] A CS-Map usage scenario

[Howard Butler]

All (well, Norm, mostly),

I develop a library called libLAS (http://liblas.org) that implements  
the ASPRS LAS specification.  The spec defers its handling of SRS  
information and basically says "use GeoTIFF keys," which is fine  
except for the fact that GeoTIFF keys aren't human readable and few  
softwares can interpret them.  Users of libLAS would like to not have  
to worry about the guts of GeoTIFF key handling, and I would like for  
libLAS to optionally provide linkage to handle the translation and  
interpretation of the GeoTIFF keys.

For the libLAS 1.0 release, we used libgeotiff directly to turn the  
GeoTIFF keys into a proj4 string and pass that around.  This was fine  
for the 1.0 release but proj4's expressiveness is limited.  SRSNames  
and EPSG codes disappear and kill your ability to have transitive  
SRSs.  If I understand correctly, proj4 also doesn't do vertical datums.

For the next libLAS release, I would like to improve the situation.   
Here's what I see as options, and I was hoping for some guidance on  
what to do:

1) Plug my ears and close my eyes and say that proj4 is all anyone  
would ever need :)
2) Provide an interface directly to the GeoTIFF keys and make the  
users figure out how to interpret them.
3) Link to GDAL for OSR support.  This could provide GTIFGetOGISDefn  
and GTIFSetFromOGISDefn which could do GDAL's WKT flavor <-> GeoTIFF  
keys.  No vertical datum support as far as I know.
4) Use CS-Map.

I know how to do options 1-3, but I don't know if option 4 is viable.   
A few questions come to mind, which I could maybe answer by diving  
into the source code, but I was hoping for quicker answers :)

- Does CS-Map read/write/interpret GeoTIFF keys?
- I presume CS-Map does vertical datums.  Is describing those with  
GeoTIFF keys and WKT a problem?
- What would be considered CS-Map's "public API" and how would one  
going about linking and using CS-Map in your own software?

I would be interested to hear if there are options that I hadn't  
considered for my usage scenario above.  I would like for libLAS to  
provide a convenient way to interact with SRSs, but maybe this  
minefield is too dense and too large.  Maps that tell me where not to  
step would be greatly appreciated :)

Howard