[SoC] SoC GDAL2Tiles: Poster, Zurich Office, Global Tiles

[Klokan Petr Přidal]

Hello folks,

Yesterday I successfully presented my SoC project GDAL2Tiles in Google
Zurich Office, on the Open Source Jam session.
It was a nice experience, I think I made a good advertisement for GDAL
:-), and I was speaking with some of the engineers about GDAL2Tiles as
well. I also saw all the attractions of the Zurich Office. Look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPz1Mou-Xxk

There is a poster for GDAL2Tiles Project, so if you are interested you
can have a look at:
http://www.mzk.cz/~klokan/gdal2tiles-poster.pdf

The slideshow from that presentation is published as well, there is a
screen cast from Google Earth and and life preview of practical usage
of GDAL2Tiles in the National Library of Scotland (a map from
collection of British Library - a raster map with size over 30 GB).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3OiifZQEqE

I got a report about broken GDAL2Tiles functionality (KMZ generation),
and I realized there is probably a bug (or a disappeared feature) in
latest Google Earth KMZ implementation - so I should report it to
developers.
Keo reported a bug in tilemapresource.xml in GDAL2Tiles. Now it is
patched in svn gdal trunk.

I created a sandbox in gdal svn and uploaded there the python
tmsprofiles.py module, which implements two classes: GlobalMercator
and GlobalGeodetic. With those classes you can do all coordinate
conversion you need for generation of tiles, which are compatible with
Google Maps.
It is also a base for any conversion of tiles between TMS, Google-like
coordinates, Microsoft QuadTree names.
You can easily generate a list of tiles intersecting your raster map
(bounding box), and for each tile get extent in epsg:900913 or
epsg:4326.
All of this functionality is necessary for new generation of GDAL2Tiles

A shell script which is using gdalwarp for creating tiles was
generated with this python module, just to test the correctness of the
tile creation. It is running, so next week I think I will publish some
global tiles with viewer on top of Google Maps.

I was playing a lot with VRT warp xml format, and I realized that it
is excellent for purpose of GDAL2Tiles raster reprojection. Thank you
a lot GDAL developers for this functionality.

There was also some work done on Google Maps API browser, for
supporting tile overlay. It is a base for new googlemaps.html
template, which is included in GDAL2Tiles.

I submitted the Midterm Evaluation, Hobu: please submit it as well...

Best regards

Klokan