[SoC] SoC Proposal on a OGR Driver for MongoDB

[Alex Mandel]

On 03/17/2014 11:23 AM, Zhang, Shuai wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I wrote a proposal about a MongoDB Driver for GDAL/OGR, which has been submitted to the melange. I regard GSoC as a great opportunity to get connected with the Open Source world. Well, since it's my first time to do this, I'm really not sure whether it's proper. Here are some info.
> 
> OGR Driver for MongoDB
> MongoDB, a document database that provides high performance, high availability, and easy scalability, can be a good platform for storing extremely large spatial datasets, to support high performance geo-computation and real-time spatial analysis in a large scale.This project aims at developing a OGR Driver for MongoDB to help applications or softwares based on GDAL, such as QGIS, Mapserver, Geoserver, Mapnik, ArcGIS and so on, read & write the spatial data in it, and thus enable the Open Source GIS Ecosystem powered by the advanced NoSQL database.
> 
> A FEW WORDS ABOUT ME
> I'm a PhD candidate in my second year, with high performance geo-computation as my main research fields. This project is actually part of my research undergoing. when i saw the OSGeo GSoC flyer a week ago, i thought why not cooperate with the Open Source community and contribute my research. thereby, i wrote the proposal.
> 
> I have spent a lot of time learning GDAL and building parallel geo-algorithms on it, so i think i'm quite familiar with GDAL/OGR and know how it works in the code level. I also devoted lots of my time in playing with MongoDB since we need a faster solution to support our high performance computing applications running on a large scale Linux cluster. the thought making GDAL/OGR communicate with MongoDB culster was just wonderful, simply because it prevents us from re-invent the wheel and get lots of GIS tools reusable.
> 
> I'm looking forward to your advises.
> thank you for your time and consideration.
> 
> My Regards,
> shuai
> 
> 

I assume you've started discussions about this topic on the gdal-dev
mailing list and added your idea to their SOC idea page? Please discuss
your idea there, as someone from GDAL/OGR would need to be the mentor
for the project.

Also how does this relate to the current implementation of geospatial
data storage in MongoDB? Writing a GDAL/OGR driver assumes that the
format already exists. Any reason it can't be both vector and raster?
I found http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/applications/geospatial-indexes/

These links also seems relevant:
http://www.paolocorti.net/2009/12/06/using-mongodb-to-store-geographic-data/
http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2013-February/035406.html

Thanks,
Alex