[technology-pmc] raster processing engine planning

[Jody Garnett <jody.garnett@xxxxxxxxx>]

Since this project is new, it does not quite have an email, or even codebase yet. It is however an example (like SFCurve) of something cool we can do here at LocationTech - identify "gaps" in our technology stack and fill them.

Last month I was reminded of the Scientific Working Group "Advanced Visualization Project" by MM). This project description is very cool (the scientific community has lots of fun code bases to draw on). The proposal includes the following line:

Imaging is of particular interest to the working groups and others in the Foundation. This project plans to develop an open-source, friendly-licensed alternative to the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) API.

Looking through my email history with Jay Billings (the project lead) they are initially wrapping ImageJ (national health organization "public domain" project <-- public domain is not really a license is it?).

I attended a scientific working group meeting in 2015 and compared notes on raster processing challenges; I believe they added this line about replacing JAI in part to have an opportunity to work with LocationTech.

ImageJ was evaluated for use for raster processing, it had some of the required feature list (specifically multidimensional). If I remember correctly it came up short when working on larger than memory raster sets; and would need some tweaking to work on raster data (think elevations) rather than just imagery.

TLDR: I believe there is scope to collaborate with the Scientific working group on raster processing, the LocationTech Raster Processing Engine can help the Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project meet its long term goals.

Branding note - We tend to focus on LocationTech branding, where the Science working group used Eclipse branding. I expect that is because we have been looking out to LocationTech branding and marketing.

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Jody Garnett