[gdal-dev] Is the SOSI Norwegian driver still useful?

[Tachon Mathieu]

Hi,

The SOSI driver (fyba) integrated in GDAL is an old version and has not been updated for many years. We have an updated version of it in the GIS software (in-house) developed by the National Mapping Authority in Norway (Kartverket), that many people in the organisation use. There are major changes in the updated version: use of wchar data type instead of char data type for dealing with strings, it can handle UTF8 encoding, the object types and properties tables have been updated, amongst other things. As the latter were hard-coded and that the SOSI data model change rather dynamically, this is one of reasons for which newer versions of fyba have not been ported to GDAL, as it would require much time and resources. fyba has now extended its internal use of GDAL, which may rely on different versions of GDAL from the latest ones (not sure about that), and the people working with it find it challenging to keep an updated version of the SOSI driver in GDAL. We do not really have resources internally (at Kartverket) for doing such work. At the same time, SOSI will no longer be used as exchange format in just a few years. We also have currently a discussion internally about whether the SOSI driver should be removed from GDAL or not.

Kind regards,

Mathieu
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