[OSGeo-Discuss] projection projects

[Frank Warmerdam]

Mike Adair wrote:
> I'd like to follow up on a conversation that took place at FOSS4G in 
> Victoria regarding a gathering of the open source projection clan under 
> the OSGeo umbrella.  Frank can probably expand on the idea more, but the 
> idea being that it would be an opportunity to build up a community 
> around the various coordinate system projects, each of which likely 
> wouldn't be able to sustain that on their own.
> 
> My immediate motivation for bringing this up now is that I need to set 
> up a project infrastructure for proj4js [1]  (svn, trac, email, PSC, 
> etc.).  This might be a good fit as an OSGeo 'Lab' project as discussed 
> a few months ago, either as a project on it's own or within a group of 
> projection projects.

Mike,

Good timing!  I am still interested in this concept though I haven't followed
up on it yet.  My hope was that we could treat a variety of coordinate system
activities as one Project from an OSGeo point of view.  This helps get us
past the issue that some (all?) of them are rather small in terms of teams
to justify the full "OSGeo project treatment".

But more importantly it would give us a forum to cooperate.  Sharing
things like coordinate system dictionaries, test suites and such.

My hopes for participants include:

   proj4js
   proj.4 (the version of PROJ.4 that I maintain)
   libproj4 (the projection-only library maintained by Gerald Evenden)
   OSGSpatialReference (GDAL coordinate system translation classes)
   CS-Map (the recently open sourced library from Norm Olsen)

I'm also hopeful that folks from GeoTools, and OSSIM who maintain their
own projections code would participate to take advantage of the
dictionaries and test suites even though their libraries wouldn't
be part of the project.

This is a somewhat unorthodox arrangement so I've hesitated a bit to
initiate things.  Also, it obviously needs agreement from several
parties. :-)

In the interest of moving on a bit, I've created a wiki page:

   http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/MetaCRS

I've also created a mailing list.  Please join if you have an
interest.

   http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/MetaCRS

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org