Incubation Application: STARSpan

[jgrn307]

1. Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.

Jonathan A. Greenberg, greenberg@…

2. Please provide the names and emails of co-project owners (if any).

Carlos Rueda, carueda@…

3. Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all official committers

N/A

4. Please describe your Project.

StarSpan is designed to bridge the raster and vector worlds of spatial analysis using fast algorithms for pixel level extraction from geometry features (points, lines, polygons). StarSpan generates ASCII and raster databases of extracted pixel values (from one or a set of raster images), fused with the database attributes from the vector files. This allows a user to do statistical analysis of the pixel vs. attribute data in many existing packages and can greatly speed up classification training and testing. STARSpan fills a critical hole in extracting vector-associated raster data, and shines with large and multi-image datasets. The addition of the “minirasterstrip” output (see presentation or documentation) allows a user to greatly increase the efficiency of investigation multiple image transforms (spatial and spectral) and classifiers for map production.

5. Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project?

The commitment to open source standards for geospatial software, our positive experience with OSGeo board members, and a wider audience for our software.

6. Type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.):

Standalone currently, although we would like to integrate it into other open source (e.g. GRASS GIS) and commercial products (e.g. ENVI/IDL).

7. Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.

Starspan currently uses GDAL/OGR for much of its backbone, and requires the GEOS open source library. We began, but did not complete, a GRASS GIS wrapper for the code.

8. Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.

I have written some rudimentary ENVI/IDL wrappers for starspan.

9. Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?

The BSD License, copyright the Regents of the University of California.

10. Is there already a beta or official release?

Yes. ​http://starspan.casil.ucdavis.edu/doku/doku.php?id=download

11. What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)?

STARSpan was developed by the Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (​http://cstars.ucdavis.edu/) at the University of California Davis. To support several large scale remote sensing projects (raster datasets exceeding 500GB and over 60 individual hyperspectral images).

12. Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, ect.) Has the software been certified to any standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the project owners to seek certification at some point?

Not currently, but aren’t inherently against the idea.

13. Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright?

It is free of patents and trademarks, but at least currently the copyright is held by the Regents of the University of California. Should this be a problem, we can make more specific inquiries to see if we can have the copyright listed under J. Greenberg and C. Rueda. (J Greenberg is a postdoc at UC Davis).

14. How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time?

Two.

15. How many people have commit access to the source code respository?

Two.

16. Approximately how many users are currently using this project?

Unknown at present. We’ve had over 2700 total project downloads to date.

17. What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )?

All of the above, we would think.

18. If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation?

N/A.

19. Does the project include an automated build and test?

Build yes, test not currently.

20. What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)

C++ and JAVA (for the GUI).

21. What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?

English and Spanish.

22. What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How many users do you expect to download the project when it is released?

5 to 10 mb. We can’t tell how popular it would be at present.

I've attached a powerpoint presentation I gave on starspan a few weeks ago.

[pagameba]

This application is way out of date, the project has changed considerably but is still active. It seems that Matthew Perry is maintaining the most active/recent version on github under Ecotrust (​https://github.com/Ecotrust/starspan). I have contacted the dev team via their listed email address and will update the application or close this ticket based on their feedback.

[EliL]

I talked with Matt Perry and he said he was not interested in pursuing STARSpan as an OSGeo project and shifting some of his zonal statistics work to GDAL and numpy. There are a few other forks on github but none seem to be recently active. I'll make some additional minimal effort to see if anyone else is interested or active on this and if not, then suggest the closing of this ticket.

[jive]

Fair enough, thanks for making contact.