Incubator Application: MetaCRS

[warmerdam]

This application is still provisional and has not been approved by the MetaCRS PSC.

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

Frank Warmerdam (warmerdam@…) is the chair of the MetaCRS PSC.

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

• Hugues Wisniewski
• Norm Olson
• Mike Adair

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

The only other current committer I'm aware of is Richard Didier, IGN, specifically for the PROJ.4 component.

4. Please describe your Project.

The MetaCRS project is a federation of geographic coordinate system related projects. It currently includes the CS-Map, PROJ.4 and Proj4js coordinate system conversion libraries (in C++, C and JavaScript respectively) and the libgeotiff library for managing coordinate systems in geotiff files. It is also intended to be a locus for communication about coordinate system related issues (with folks from projects like GeoTools, and OSSIM), and it is planned that it will take on responsibility for maintaining coordinate system dictionaries (as used by projects such as GDAL, PostGIS, and QGIS for instance).

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

OSGeo can provide reliable hosting and desirable tools (like Trac). Hosting at OSGeo also makes it possible to use OSGeo userids to facilitate cooperation.

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

Primarily a collection of libraries.

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

The PROJ.4 library is used by PostGIS, MapServer, GDAL, QGIS, GRASS and a number of other projects.

The CS-Map library is used by MapGuide.

The Proj4js library is used by MapBuilder, and various other JavaScript applications.

The libgeotiff library is used by GDAL, OSSIM, and indirectly by many other projects.

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

CS-Map was previously proprietary software recently contributed to MetaCRS by Autodesk. The two key developers (Norm Olson and Hughes Wisniewski) are Autodesk employees.

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

The CS-Map, PROJ.4, and libgeotiff are released under an MIT/X style license. Proj4js is under LGPL.

10. Is there already a beta or official release?

Yes.

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

CS-Map was originally proprietary commercial software.

PROJ.4 originated at the USGS.

Proj4JS originated as part of the MapBuilder project.

libgeotiff originated from the USGS.

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?

The software packages to varying degrees support OGC WKT, and EPSG coordinate system usage. None of the projects currently support any of the OGC web services specifications (like WCTS) or the formal specification of the OGC Coordinate Systems specification. It is a goal of the project to better support OGC and other appropriate standards.

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

Yes, to the best of our knowledge. This will be reviewed during incubation.

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

There are roughly ten active contributors at this time.

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

We are currently migrating some of the projects to SVN so this is somewhat in flux. Practically speaking roughly six or seven.

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

This is difficult to know. There are likely on the order of 100 developers directly using the various libraries. Vast numbers of end users are indirectly using the various libraries in open source and commercial products.

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

Primarily government and commercial, though coordinate system handling is fundamental to most geospatial applications.

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?

I think this is a lame question, and you guys should stop asking it!

And we intend to host everything at OSGeo.

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

Each of the libraries except for libgeotiff includes some test suites, but it is our hope to improve support for automated build and test.

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

C/C++ and JavaScript.

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

English

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?

libgeotiff - 1MB

PROJ.4 - 700KB

Proj4js - 60KB

CS-MAP - big - including all the dictionaries and support data files.

We anticipate a large portion of all geospatial software users will be using one or more of our components as part of their software stack.