Slashgeo

mlucas17 writes "ossimPlanet is a high performance, cross platform, open source software virtual earth. It differs from other solutions in that it is scientifically accurate, does not require pre-layering of data sets, and is written in C++. Binary installers for Windows and MacOSX and source code for all platforms are located at http://www.ossim.org.  It is built on top of OpenSceneGraph for advanced visualization and OSSIM for geo-spatial processing. OSSIM is one of the founding projects of the OSGeo foundation." This sounds really great. The website does not provide answers to some questions such as: does it supports kml? How ossimPlanet is or is not a competitor to NASA World Wind Java? Why is ossimPlanet rather unknown in the geospatial community at this moment?

I just learned about Building Information Modeling last week at GeoTec 2007, including talks from the OGC and about CityGML. The CAD-GIS Interoperability shares his account of the U.S. National BIM conference while Vector One shares his view on BIM and GIS. From Vector One: "When I consider BIM, I think of it not solely in terms of one structure, but also inclusive of the ’space’ around and interacting with a given structure. Those questions I might ask of CAD system during the design, operation and management of a structure are only part of a larger geospatial equation, one including GIS. Why? Because GIS are capable of analyzing the relationships of space and features independently or collectively, together."

Kurt's weblog made me aware the open source GIS project named Minerva, not yet mentioned here before. Here's the Minerva presentation done at the FOSS4G 2007 event. As the presentation show, Minerva can display geodata in 3D over 7 large boards. From the summary: "Minerva's primary strength is the ability to display raster and vector data together from multiple sources with the benefit of high-performance computer graphics (including animating through temporal data sets). By using robust open source toolkits like OSSIMPlanet, we are able to manage gigabytes worth of terrain and image layers. Minerva is an open-source project under active development at Arizona State University's Decision Theater and is used in our production facility to support policy decision-making meetings for our customers. Projects completed with Minerva vary from school enrollment to disease propagation studies." In addition to OSSIM, Minerva uses PostGIS and OpenSceneGraph.