RE: [udig-devel] rendering of geotiff

["Martin Schouwenburg" <schouwenburg@xxxxxx>]

Hi! We disabled GeoTiff support for the udig 1.0.0 release (based on
justthe kind of experience you have had).  The geotools library we are
using does not include a very good GeoTiff implementation (when we did
get it to work you will find it was very slow).

There are two bright sides to this story:
- we are talking with OSSIM
- the geotools "GridCoverage" developers are actually focused on
implementing a Web Coverage Service for GeoServer. As such they are
running into the same problems and are making a lot of progress on
performance (as they learn to hack Java Advanced Imaging at a very low
level). I have CCed one of the developers on this project in the hopes
he can provide an update of GeoTIFF support.

I hope our reasoning for not supporting GeoTIFF (until it is good) makes
sense. We are an open project, so if you did have anyone with GeoTIFF
and Java hacking ability we would welcome assistance in this matter.

Cheers,
Jody

PS. You are not alone - at the OSG'05 conference GeoTIFF was the most
requested feature

_______________________________________________
User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) http://udig.refractions.net
http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel

So I gather there two problems (?)
1) dissattisfaction with the geotools geotiff code
2) Changing of the interfaces

Why not use Gdal for the geotiff (a.o.) part. We build access from Java
to Gdal using JNI based on the geo-api interface. Could read, write and
create gridcoverages from java in there with reasonable performance. We
did not finish it entirely but that has more to do with the changes that
will happen in the geo-api interfaces with respect to ISO 19123 (we did
not want to spent more time on implementing things that will change
anyhow).

In GeoTiff (internals) itself we have experience, coded our own
conversions from geotiff to (at that moment) our internal ILWIS format.
So the knowledge about Geotiff is ok I guess.

With respect to interfaces I think we could contribute, many years
experience on both the practical use of gridcoverages and the software
side of it (and defining our interfaces for it). So whom should I
contact there to talk with.

The point is we would like to use Udig as base for our further
developments. At the ITC where I do my work I think that the usage of
raster/vector is about 70/30, a package that does not support rasters is
difficult to sell here.

Martin Schouwenburg
schouwenburg@xxxxxx