[OSGeo-Discuss] Is Your Project In OSGeo Labs?

[Ari Jolma]

On 11/29/2012 02:31 AM, Landon Blake wrote:
> I'm in the process of trying to take over as the steward for OSGeo
> Labs as part of my duties with the OSGeo Incubation Committee. As part
> of this process I'd like to get a handle on the projects that are "in"
> labs. There is a short list of "stable" and "young and experimental"
> projects on the current Labs wiki page. Since I'm editing that page
> today, here is the list:
>
> Stable Projects:
> - GeoWebCache
> - pgRouting
>
> Young and Experimental Projects
> - GeoExt
> - GeoFunctions
> - Geoinformatica

Geoinformatica is my project, it's not young, but it's experimental. 
It's made of a part in C, libral, and several Perl packages, which build 
on GDAL and GTK+ Perl bindings (I also maintain the GDAL Perl bindings). 
The oldest parts are in libral, which date at least 10 years back. 
libral was a simple raster algebra package, but I've added to it a 
simple visualization library to render GDAL rasters and vectors to a 
memory canvas (pixbuf), which can be given to GDK (a GTK+ subsystem). 
I've made an effort to separate this library into a library of its own 
(gvl - also a part of Geoinformatica), but it's not in use.

Geoinformatica has a very small community, I guess one reason is because 
the Perl geospatial community is small(?) and distributed. Also, maybe 
it's the experimental or personal thing, but maintaining stable APIs or 
a reasonable development path in several interdependent libraries has 
been quite difficult for me. However, I regularly use Geoinformatica 
myself. I use the GUI a bit less because QGIS has become very good and 
because there is not yet useful WMS and WFS GUIs to use the GDAL WMS and 
WFS drivers in it. Lately I've written WxS servers (WMS and WFS are 
functional already) with it - Perl has traditionally very good web/CGI 
support so that's interesting.

I think OSGeo Labs could be a good forum and platform for collaboration 
with academia, especially the OSGeo Academic Network and the emerging 
network of research labs collaborating with OSGeo and FOSS4G in general. 
One issue I have observed is that the developer community in academic 
FOSS4G (and other geospatial) users/members is still a small minority. 
Yes, I'm in academia too.

This may be the best portal for Geoinformatica things in the web

http://geoinformatics.aalto.fi/en/software/

Cheers and thanks Landon for taking this up,

Ari

> - OpenGeocoder
> - OpenRouter
> - Grids
> - OSGeo Graphics
> - pycsw
> - OWSLib
> - SemanticGeo
> - ZOO-Project
>
> Can you please let me know if you are involved with one of these
> projects? I'm trying to determine which projects are "in" labs, and
> then establish a point of contact with each project so I can help them
> get ready for official incubation.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Landon
>
> P.S. - If you have thoughts on the purpose and work of OSGeo Labs,
> please let me know. I have my own vision, but I'd like to get feedback
> from other OSGeo members.
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