[OSGeo-Discuss] A report on my recent trip to Brazil

[Chris Holmes]

> 4. After 5 days of meetings, I visited Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas
> Espacias (INPE) <http://www.inpe.br/ingles/index.php/>, the premier
> Brazilian National Institute for Space Research at the invitation of
> its Image Processing Division (DPI) in nearyby São José dos Campos.
> Researchers from DPI are also developing a project called TerraLib
> <http://www.terralib.org/>, an open source set of GIS classes and
> functions library written in C++. Of particular interest is a program
> called TerraView <http://www.dpi.inpe.br/terraview/index.php> based on
> TerraLib. Also open source (GPL), TerraView can be described as a more
> scientifically and analytically oriented ArcView. I promptly
> downloaded TerraView, and within minutes, with a little help from the
> TerraView Development Manager, I had it running under Parallels/WinXP
> on my MacBook Pro, and had imported Shapefiles into its own data
> format. A very quick program, TerraView not only works with PostGres,
> MySQL, and Oracle, it natively manages geographic data in a relational
> format using ADO. TerraLib/TerraView are successors to INPE's earlier
> free, but not open source, project called SPRING
> <http://www.dpi.inpe.br/spring/english/index.html>. Because of
> historical reasons, SPRING is not open source, but is available to
> anyone and can be used on Windows or Linux. TerraLib/TerraView are
> currently under more active development, and are available as true
> open source programs. At my suggestion, INPE will be looking into
> joining OSGeo. The INPE researchers are doing amazing work, and the
> spirit of free access to data and software seemed to permeate everyone
> I met. Having active involvement and backing of an institute of INPE's
> prestige and caliber will be very beneficial to the open geospatial
> community.
I heard about this project when Iwas in Brazil, and was really impressed
by the amount of effort going in to it.  I think at the time the
government was employing something like over 40 people working on it. 
Not sure if that's still the case, but there's obviously a lot of
effort.  But it's frustrating because it's all parallel to the rest of
our efforts.  It'd be great to get them to be a part of OSGeo, but
_really_ great if we get their work inter-operating with what we are
doing and hopefully contributing to common software packages, and indeed
having their stuff implement OGC standards.  If you have contacts I'd be
more than happy to help talk to them further.

Chris