[pdal] PDAL Pipeline Extensibility

[Adam Steer]

Just trying to unpack this idea: is the thinking around enabling some external program - for example some bespoke, super efficient, parallelised, on-the-fly classifer; or some other point modifier that isn’t, or won’t/can’t be in PDAL - to modify points as they’re read/written?

Without having actually had a need to use such a capacity, it seems pretty handy and might open doors to a whole host of new capabilities in PDAL.

So:
q1: without having actually had a need to use such a capacity, it seems useful
q2: keeping mind the answer to q1 - nope. ‘application’ seems to be a good label for that particular box
q3: will need to defer to others - I consider myself a PDAL/JSON beginner

Standing back a bit, probably being quite ignorant about a bunch of stuff, and thinking about supporting PDAL in N years time - I see a small risk of slowing some feature development in PDAL (maybe? can I think of a case of how? possibly developer X’s killer app never makes it into PDAL as a feature because it no longer needs to?) and based on this a small risk of making more dependency issues (using developer X’s killer app, now anyone deploying it has to maintain versions of two things). However, in this scenario it is also reasonable to expect that an organisation relying on an OSS project would contribute some resources in order to mitigate those issues.

Hope that helps - and I hope more experienced folk chime in!



>> {
>>  "pipeline":[
>>    {
>>    "type" : "readers.las",
>>    "filename" : "/data/255.laz”,
>>    "application": {
>>        "something": 42,
>>        "something_else": {"key":"value"},
>>        "lots_of_things":[1,2,4,8]
>>    }
>>    },
>>    {
>>        "type":"writers.gdal",
>>        "radius":10.5,
>>        "resolution":6,
>>        "filename":"/data/dem.tif",
>>        "application": {
>>            "comment": "a string",
>>            "my_app": {"key":"value"},
>>            "user_who_made_this": "howard",
>>            "center_point":{ "type": "Point", "coordinates": [100.0, 0.0] },
>>            "box":{ "type": "Polygon", "coordinates": [[ [100.0, 0.0], [101.0, 0.0], [101.0, 1.0], [100.0, 1.0], [100.0, 0.0] ]]}
>>        }
>>    }
>> ]
>> }
> 


> The idea is applications can use this 'application' node to transmit and communicate their own information through PDAL pipelines. I have three questions:
> 
> 1) Is this useful enough to support?
> 2) Do you have a better name than 'application'?
> 3) Is the a standard convention that people use in JSON to do this kind of thing?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Howard
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