[Liblas-devel] libLAS/libPC -- looking for funding, sponsorship (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Finnegan, David ERDC-CRREL-NH]

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Mike,

No shame here on who is funding this. Significant support for libLAS, lasZIP
and the development of libPC has been funded through the US Army Corps of
Engineers at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab. We are working in
Cooperation with NGA (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency) to develop
open source tools to support Oracle based storage and retrieval of point
clouds in a database environment. This includes development of LAS specific
tools, point cloud translation libraries and processing tools.

We will continue to support these initiatives into the future as best we can
but having support from other commercial, government and individuals is
greatly welcome. As Mike said, financial support is always great but having
individuals out there helping with development is always appreciated. The
recent discussions about what others are doing in the open source community
have been great and personally  would like to see some of these efforts
converge where possible.

Best,
Dave


David C. Finnegan
Research Physical Scientist
US Army Cold Regions Research & Eng. Lab
72 Lyme Rd
Hanover, NH 03755 




-----Original Message-----
From: liblas-devel-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:liblas-devel-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Michael P. Gerlek
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2011 11:25 AM
To: liblas-devel at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [Liblas-devel] libLAS/libPC -- looking for funding, sponsorship

Do you use libLAS in your products, or would you if it had some additional
features you need?  If so, please read on.


libLAS has been a success, but the world of point cloud support for
geospatial applications goes well beyond just reading and writing the LAS
format -- we want support for other formats, spatial index integration, a
suite of core command line tools, database integration, and so on.  To that
end, as some of you may have already heard, the lasLAS team has begun work on
"version 2" of libLAS, known as libPC.  The project goals are:

1. libPC is a library which provides APIs for reading, writing, and 
   processing point cloud data of various formats.  Additionally, some 
   command line tools are provided.  As GDAL is to 2D pixels, libPC is to 
   multidimensional points.
    
2. From a market perspective, libPC is "version 2" of libLAS.  The actual 
   code base will be different, however, and the APIs will not be
   compatible.

3. The libPC implementation has high performance, yet the API remains 
   flexible.  We recognize that these two goals will conflict at times and 
   will weigh the tradeoffs pragmatically.
  
4. The architecture of a libPC-based workflow will be a pipeline of 
   connected stages, each stage being either a data source (such as a file
   reader), a filter (such as a point thinner), or data sink (such as a
   file writer).

5. The libPC library will be in C++, but will also include a C API and will
   have SWIG bindings for languages like Python and C#. libPC will support 
   multiple platforms, specifically Windows, Linux, and Mac.

6. libPC is open source and is released under a BSD license.


In part with funding from a generous US govt sponsor (not sure if I should
name them, sorry), libPC development is already well underway.

However, more development needs to happen before it can reach parity with
libLAS and start to go into production mode.  To do this, of course, your
material support is needed.

If you use libLAS today in your world -- or if you would like to, if only it
had some missing feature -- please consider helping to fund the libLAS team.
This can be done in a variety of ways:

  - "buy" open development time to further the core libPC work
  - "sponsor" the team to implement a particular feature you need
  - loan a member of your own development staff to the team for a specific
task

Please contact me (mpg at flaxen.com) if you're interested in supporting open
source software.

-mpg


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