[gdal-dev] UFO format / GDAL 3.0

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

Since some time a few ideas came to my mind and I felt today was a good one to 
share them and get feedback.
Considering the never ending proliferation of GIS file formats, currently 220 
handled in GDAL trunk, it seems wise to put an end to it. Especially since the 
counter used to iterate over the drivers is a unsigned 8 bit, so we will soon 
be unable to add more, or at the expense of sacrificing our ports to Intel 8008 
or Motorola 6800, which would be pretty sad.

Therefore I'd like to propose the UFO format, which stands for Universal 
Format Oh-yeaaah!
The basic idea of UFO is that it isn't a fixed format, but a varying and self-
described one. XML (or perhaps EXI?) + XSD + XSLT + XPath + Schematron could 
probably do it, but for efficiency I thought to a byte-code interpreted by 
libgdal and whose interface with libgdal would match the GDAL driver 
interface. So basically each dataset would contain its own driver. The big 
plus is that you could write image translators that would generate binary 
encodings optimized for the particular dataset being encoded: for example, it 
is kind of stupid to write the values of each pixel of a Mandelbrot fractal 
whereas its mathematical description fits into a few lines of code. 
Furthermore, still pursuing with that example, we could even have raster of 
arbitrary resolution, since that's a characteristics of fractals. And many GIS 
datasets have indeed fractal charasterics, such as coastlines ( 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox )
For security reason, we should aim at supporting only simple & verifiable 
languages, so Brainfuck (Brainf**k for the most puritans of us) seems to be a 
good fit : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck. Basically it is a Turing 
complete language with only 8 commands. So as much powerful as needed, while 
being very easy to learn and implement. To save some efforts, I'd humbly 
suggest we adopt libbf ( http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/libbf ), an older 
project of mine that also incorporates a on-the-fly optimizer & compiler for 
most popular architectures.

The plan would be to have an initial version of the UFO driver ready for GDAL 
2.0 and push strongly for its widespread adoption in all GIS, remote sensing, 
OSS & proprietary vendors, etc.... Perhaps we should establish a dedicated 
workgroup at OGC to make it a standard ? Then we could deprecate and remove 
all existing drivers and at the time of GDAL 3.0, UFO would be the only one 
remaining driver, making the Intel 8008 port very happy!

Happy to hear from your thoughts before formalizing that as a RFC,

Even

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