Posts Tagged CS-Map
CS-Map in MapGuide: Guess I was wrong
Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, OSGeo, Open Source on August 7, 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
CS-Map: What’s the big deal?
Posted by Jason Birch in OSGeo, Open Source on August 4, 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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