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CS-Map: What’s the big deal?


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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This entry was posted on August 4, 2008, 2:09 pm and is filed under OSGeo, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. #1 by Mateusz Loskot on August 5, 2008 - 10:32 am

    Jason,

    Thanks for this background. Without your post, I’d never found the Autodesk press release. Hmm, perhaps it would be a good idea to announce it in OSGeo News as well.

    BTW, first patche to CS-Map is there ;-)