Ciao Cameron,
I remember talking to Shaun about issues related to ECW support.
Long story short.
The work on interfacing GDAL Java bindings to ImageIO/JAI and then straight
into GeoTools, started as an experiment during last summer under the hat of
the GSOC 2006. The student working on it under having me as a mentor (poor
guy! ) was Daniele Romagnoli. The outcome at the end of the summer was
that we managed to have a decent ECW ImageReader and an experimental HDF4
reader (well HDF format is always a pain).
After a couple of months when both me and Daniele for various reasons had no
time to work on the project we brought it back to life at the beginning of
November 2006, starting to think about adding writing capabilities.
Since then we have spent like 20% of our time working on the library to
extend it to other formats and to add other capabilities beyond what you can
do using only gdal.
The library.
The structure of the library right now is as follows:
+library
+gdalframework
General framework to communicate with gdal swig bindings
+customstreams
A large set of high performance java streams
+plugin
+arcgrid
An ImageIO reader for ascii grids based on gdal bindings, it
should be already pretty usable.
+directkakadu
A simple ImageIO reader for jp2 files based on kakadu
library directly, needs s ome work
+ecw
An imageio reader for ECW file format through gdal, it
should be already pretty usable.
+hdf
An imageio reader for HDF4 file format through gdal, need
some tuning
+javaarcgrid
A pure java ImageIO reader for ascii grids, ready.
+jhdf
An experimental plugin for reading and writing hdf4/5 files
using drectly the jhdf lib
+jp2kakadu
An ImageIO reader and writer for jp2 files using kakadu
through gdal, very good state. I have used it to compress
1.5 gb geotiff with no problems.
+jpeg
An ImageIO reader for jpeg files using gdal, it should be
already pretty usable.
+mrsid
A smple Imageio erader for mrsid files using gdal, it should
be already pretty usable.
+geotiff
An ImageIO reader and writer for geotiff using gdal, it
should be already pretty usable.
NOTE that for formats like ECW, jp2 and mrsid, once you have an ImageIO
reader, writing geotools plugin is a matter of 2-3 days.
Now the status.
There is a lot of code already to share. There a few flaws that I wish I get
the time to work on soon:
-better handling of metadata (gdal itself is not really focused on metadata
management though there is a RFC about that right now)
-better management of writing
Writing can be tricky in gdal when it comes to driver that only support the
create copy. Right now we are relying on an ugly hack to get it going but I
am trying to think about a way to fix it for good.
-more multidimensional formats
Actually we are are going to integrate some work we did on netcdf with the
great work that other geotools developers have been doing.
Conclusion.
We are thinking about releasing as soon as possible as a fully fledged Open
Source project under LGPL in order to get some money and/or help from people
to to support this work. Maybe we didn't talk much about what we were doing
but we were pretty busy :-).
As far as talking about timing, are we talking about read-only support or
r-w? Which formats would you be interested with? Just ECW/JP2?
The best thing (at least from my standpoint) would be put together more than
one party that is interested in getting this kind of capabilities into
udig/geoserver/geotools so that would be easier to come up with some sort of
support. Note that what we do can be "easily" integrated into udig and/or
geoserver.
Regards,
Simone.
PS, sorry for cross posting!!
-------------------------------------------------------
Eng. Simone Giannecchini
President /CEO GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Via Carignoni 51
55041 Camaiore (LU)
Italy
phone: +39 0584983027
fax: +39 0584983027
mob: +39 333 8128928
-------------------------------------------------------
-----Original Message-----
From: Cameron Shorter [mailto:cameron.shorter@anonymised.com]
Sent: martedì 29 maggio 2007 0.51
To: Simone Giannecchini; Christopher Schmidt; Shaun Kolomeitz
Cc: udig-devel@anonymised.com
Subject: Compression format support for Geotools/UDig
Simone,
Shaun is looking to replace Arc View 3.1 in his organisation with UDig.
One of his requirements is support for data in a compressed format such
as JPEG2000 or ECW/JPGE2000.
What is the state of development in this area?
How much development is left to be done? Ie, what level of effort is
required to get a compressed format?
Shaun is crunching numbers at the moment to see if he can put forward a
business case for switching to UDig.
Chris Holmes wrote:
<snip>
>> The other "nice" thing would be the ability to extract
>> (cookie-cut) imagery related to the project area of interest (for
taking
>> out into the field). Having this data in a compressed format such as
>> JPEG2000 or ECW/JPGE2000 would also be a plus.
> I notice there are some discussions of JPEG2000 in the java lists
which suggests that someone is
> working on it. Anyone able to give an update?
Simone is the one who's been working on it. He can likely give you more
information.
--
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254