Archive for August, 2008

CS-Map in MapGuide: Guess I was wrong

Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, OSGeo, Open Source on August 7th, 2008

Earlier this week, I mentioned that GDAL might be beating MapGuide as an early adopter of the newly open-sourced CS-Map coordinate transformation library.

Well, this evening a new RFC was presented to the MapGuide project steering committee to replace PROJ.4 with CS-Map. Guess I was wrong about the beating part… but am still very happy about the joining :)

I’d imagine that this took a bit of work, but Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise has always used CS-Map, so most of the code was probably already sitting there waiting to go. I’m a little sad to see PROJ.4 replaced, and have some questions about compatibility with existing installs, but this has always been one of our pain points integrating MapGuide Open Source with other corporate applications (FME, Autodesk Map, etc) that used CS-Map. It will be great to see this problem go away.

-J

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Data Warehousing Goodness with FDO Toolbox (sorta)

Posted by Jason Birch in Data Transformation, FDO, Open Source, Utilities on August 7th, 2008

Ok, not real data warehousing (no star schema here) but anyone who has dealt with performance issues in MapGuide due to on-the-fly joins across heterogeneous data sources knows the value of loading read-only data sets into static SDF (or SQLite!) files for rapid display.

With release 0.50 of FDO Toolbox, Jackie has done it again by allowing users to quickly take data from both spatial (FDO) data sources, and non-spatial (OLEDB) data sources, join them together, and write out performance-optimized files. This is a huge boon for folks that need to do this and can’t afford best-of-breed proprietary tools like Safe Software’s FME.

Jackie has really impressed me with the rapid development of this tool as well as his focus on providing value in three distinct areas. First, FDO Toolbox has a great GUI for FDO data transfer and administration. Second, the command line capabilities allow you to set up scheduled translations to keep your SDF files in sync with your corporate data stores. Finally, FDO Toolbox has a minimal profile and can easily be used by install scripts that need to load data, register FDO providers, and other tasks during an automated application installation.

What’s next on the horizon? Jackie’s recent post on an FDO plug-in for SharpMap provides a hint… spatial data inspection coming soon to FDO Toolbox! Now if there was only a way of plugging FDO Toolbox into MapGuide Maestro to transform data and either create packages or load data directly into MapGuide. ;)

-J

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FDO for Informix

Posted by Jason Birch in FDO, Formats, Open Source on August 5th, 2008

Boy, the folks at SL-King are on a roll. This hasn’t been announced officially yet, but the SL-King website, the Autodesk website and an FDO RFC (draft) all point to a new open source FDO provider for IBM’s Informix Dynamic Server.

The closest I’ve got to Informix is seeing it in an ESRI employee’s custom command prompt (”Informix Rules>” or something like that) at the 2001 UC, but I’m sure that this is great news for corporations that have data stored via the Spatial DataBlade. FDO increases transparency for Informix data, allowing simple web-based publishing with MapGuide Open Source, and updates and map production using desktop applications such as Autodesk Map 3D.

-J

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CS-Map: What’s the big deal?

Posted by Jason Birch in OSGeo, Open Source on August 4th, 2008

Last year at FOSS4G, Autodesk announced that they had acquired and would be open sourcing the CS-Map coordinate system library. Today, with another press release, they announced that the source code is now available (and there’s a nice mention of MapGuide Maestro in there too). The press release doesn’t specify this, but the license selected for CS-Map is the extremely liberal BSD License.

Why is this significant? Basically, because coordinate system identification and transformation is critical to almost every geospatial application. The bus factor on CS projects is generally extremely low, and they require a high degree of specialized knowledge to deliver accurate results. Having multiple projects out there means that differences in coordinate system handling and metadata can create a barrier to data sharing and interoperability. Making CS-Map open source allows open collaboration between CS-Map, PROJ.4, and other open source coordinate libraries. This was recognized in the community quite quickly, and the MetaCRS project was set up in January to allow open communication and collaboration between these projects.

This collaboration is already bearing fruit. Between Oracle 9 and Oracle 10, coordinate system handling changed considerably. Seeing this, GDAL / OGR developers working on an Oracle driver posted to the MetaCRS mailing list asking for feedback. As a result of this conversation, OGR will be calling out to CS-Map to handle Oracle coordinate systems, joining (or maybe even beating) MapGuide as an early adopter of open source CS-Map. It is clear that MetaCRS provides great value as a key initiative in open source geospatial, and I wholeheartedly support its imminent application to enter OSGeo’s incubation process.

For those of you who care, the source code for CS-Map is available on the OSGeo infrastructure. You can access it through either raw SVN, or in a more human-friendly Trac interface.

Congratulations to Autodesk and Norm Olsen for taking this important step, and to the MetaCRS community for joining together to take advantage of it!

-J

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