[SoC] SoC idea

[Tim Keitt]

Hi All,

I was just talking to potential SoC student. He has a pretty extensive
programming background and is now studying geography. I'd be
interested in your feedback on the following idea: it seems one of the
things that is sorely needed in the FOSS4G world is the ability to
generate and manipulate various meshes and tessellations. I'm thinking
of perhaps a gdal2ogr tool that would convert raster data to vector
representations (points, polygons, tin, etc.). I could see this as
part of the GDAL/OGR library. Or perhaps there is more need to allow
one to store and manipulate meshes in PostGIS? I realize there is some
capability in GRASS and some overlap with eg Starspan
(http://starspan.casil.ucdavis.edu/doku/doku.php). It would be nice
however to have stand-alone capability not tied to eg GRASS for those
that a simple command line utility. Anyway, I'd be interested in folks
have specific thoughts about whether this would be useful and what
direction to proceed.

Cheers,
Tim

-- 
Timothy H. Keitt
Associate Professor
Section of Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin
http://www.keittlab.org/