[OSGeo-Announce] Announcing PROJ 6.0.0

[Astrid Emde (OSGeo)]

PROJ 6.0.0 released!
News by the PROJ Team, posted by Kristian Evers (1. March 2019)

See also https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/announcing-proj-6-0-0/
Congratulations to the PROJ Team!

PROJ 6 has undergone extensive changes to increase its functional scope 
from a
cartographic projection engine with so-called "early-binding" geodetic 
datum
transformation capabilities to a more complete library supporting 
coordinate
transformations and coordinate reference systems.

As a foundation for other enhancements, PROJ now includes a C++ 
implementation
of the modelisation propopsed by the ISO-19111:2019 standard / OGC 
Abstract
Specification Topic 2: "Referencing By Coordinates", for geodetic 
reference
frames (datums), coordinate reference systems and coordinate operations.
Construction and query of those geodetic objects is available through a 
new C++
API, and also accessible for the most part from bindings in the C API.

Those geodetic objects can be imported and exported from and into the 
OGC
Well-Known Text format (WKT) in its different variants: ESRI WKT, GDAL 
WKT 1,
WKT2:2015 (ISO 19162:2015) and WKT2:2018 (ISO 19162:2018). Import and 
export of
CRS objects from and into PROJ strings is also supported. This 
functionality
was previously available in the GDAL software library (except WKT2 
support
which is a new feature), and is now an integral part of PROJ.

A unified database of geodetic objects, coordinate reference systems and 
their
metadata, and coordinate operations between those CRS is now available 
in a
SQLite3 database file, proj.db. This includes definitions imported from 
the
IOGP EPSG dataset (v9.6.0 release), the IGNF (French national mapping 
agency)
geodetic registry and the ESRI projection engine database. PROJ is now 
the
reference software in the "OSGeo C stack" for this CRS and coordinate 
operation
database, whereas previously this functionality was spread over PROJ, 
GDAL and
libgeotiff, and used CSV or other adhoc text-based formats.

Late-binding coordinate operation capabilities, that takes  metadata 
such as
area of use and accuracy into account, has been added. This can avoid in 
a
number of situations the past requirement of using WGS84 as a pivot 
system,
which could cause unneeded accuracy loss, or was not doable at all 
sometimes
when transformation to WGS84 was not available. Those late-binding 
capabilities
are now used by the proj_create_crs_to_crs() function and the cs2cs 
utility.

A new command line utility, projinfo, has been added to query 
information about
a geodetic object of the database, import and export geodetic objects 
from/into
WKT and PROJ strings, and display coordinate operations available 
between two
CRSs.

Download the source distribution here:

   https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-6.0.0.tar.gz
   https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-6.0.0.zip


In addition to the new version of PROJ we are also releasing new datum 
grid
packages:

proj-datumgrid-europe 1.2:

   https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-datumgrid-europe-1.2.tar.gz
   https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-datumgrid-europe-1.2.zip

   Changes include: Grids covering the UK, France and Sweden.

proj-datumgrid-north-america 1.2:

   
https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-datumgrid-north-america-1.2.tar.gz
   https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-datumgrid-north-america-1.2.zip

   Changes include: NAD83 -> NAD83(HPGN) grids, GEOIDB12 grids and the
   Canadian ntv2_0.gsb grid

proj-datumgrid-world 1.0

   https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-datumgrid-world-1.0.tar.gz
   https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-datumgrid-world-1.0.zip

   This is the first version of the world wide package. Currently it only 
holds
   the EGM2008 geoid grid.