[GRASS5] Re: OpenGIS

[Frank Warmerdam]

Markus Neteler wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 02:04:25PM -0600, John Huddleston wrote:
> > Markus,
> >
> > OpenGIS is a big issue with NRCS right now.  Is the
> > Grass development keeping in step with some of the
> > new concepts being discussed in that forum?

John, 

I am reasonably active in OGC.  What new OGC concepts should GRASS be keeping
up with?  

Markus mentioned metadata, but as I see it OGC hasn't really gotten anywhere
significant on metadata, and providing tools to use, and build FGDC style
metadata would likely have wide utility.  You can be assured that whatever
OGC does with metadata will be FGDC compatible.

I am involved in alot in the coordinate transformations group, and have been
building OGC style coordinate transformation support on top of PROJ.4 (also
used by GRASS).  I would like to make it easy to set, and view GRASS coordinate
systems in OGC WKT (and eventually XML) formats.

I also hope that publishing libgrass will make it easier make GRASS datastores
available through a variety of interfaces.  For instance I might implement a
CORBA grid coverages interface to GRASS (and many other formats) some day.

There has been alot of work on web mapping at OGC in the last couple of years.
However, that is to some extent orthagonal to GRASS.  If libgrass (or GDAL)
support was integrated into UMN MapServer, it should be easy to stand up an
OGC WMT compliant mapserver backed by GRASS datasets.  

On the vector side, I think it would be worth reviewing where OGC vector
interfaces stand while designing a vector overhaul.  However, OGC isn't too
far on topological data.  The published interfaces deal with simple features
(non-topological, whole polygons, etc).  

Best regards,

---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerda at home.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://members.home.com/warmerda
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent

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