Open Source GIS

["James E. Hopper" <hopperj@macconnect.com>]

Slashdot today has some pointers to the results of this years Open
Source GIS conference 

http://www.omsug.ca/osgis2004/proceedings.html
and
http://www.maptools.org/dl_scripts/redirector.php?path=omsug/osgis2004/2
004-05-OSS-Briefing.doc).

One of the products they talk about is Ossim

http://ossim.org

which is a very nice open source package for supporting GIS efforts. 
While there is a QT GUI that works well on Mac/Linux/Windows (and now
has very nice Mac and Windows installers), the real power is in the
library that lets you build really powerful apps with very little code. 
For instance i wrote a nice drag and drop app in carbon that lets you
convert a number of formats for things like digitial terrain elevation
data (DTED, DEM), National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF), etc into
other formats like jpeg, etc in a couple hundred lines of code most of
which is the GUI code.  

I have done an Ada binding to the main parts of the library and while i
havent put it out yet on my website, i would be willing to share it
with anyone who is interested in this type of thing.  i encapsulated
the Ossim C++ classes inside Ada tagged types and i would like some
feedback on if this is the right way to do bindings to c++ classes.  I
have also converted a number of the Ossim Tutorial apps to Ada as
examples of using the class.  I have used it in a number of apps for
work as well, but i cant really share those.

if anyone wants to work with this stuff let me know.

jim

hopperj@macconnect.com