[Gdal-dev] GDAL/OGR and the MapServer Foundation

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

Some of you may be familiar with the announcement of
a foundation to support UMN MapServer (now possibly
known as MapServer Cheetah), and a newly opensourced
web mapping technology from Autodesk.

I have participated in the rocky discussions of this foundation,
partly with an eye on possibly having GDAL/OGR become
part of this foundation.

It isn't exactly clear what that would involve, but amoung
other things, it would give some sort of institutional setting
for GDAL/OGR.  It might include setting up a technical
steering committee for GDAL/OGR, something like that
for MapServer:

  http://ms.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-1/

I am not planning on making any firm decision on such a
thing for a couple months at least, but I would like to give
the GDAL/OGR community a chance to state what they
think, and how they might like to see such a thing work.

Some of my clients have expressed a concern about the
ability of the current GDAL project to "scale up".  I would
see this as a step in that direction.  Thing would be
handled less by fiat by me, and it would given organizations
using GDAL/OGR (in some case competitors) a mechanism
to cooperate in support of GDAL/OGR.

I would add that Autodesk has also open sourced their
FDO (Feature Data Objects) library.  This is roughly
analygous to OGR (or OGR+GDAL since it also does
raster).  FDO provides a sort of database like view of
vector feature data and rasters.  It is a multi-format
architecture where providers can be implemented for
lots of formats, including databases.   It is also part of
the foundation, and might be of interest to some folks
who are using OGR.

I am doing some work on implementing a GDAL based
raster provider for FDO.  Other cross-fertilization efforts
are likely to follow over time.

Best regards,
--
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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    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent