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?

mlucas17 writes "ossimPlanet 1.6.8 is now available for download. Binary installers for MacOSX and Windows will fetch the installers. This release has improved OGC WMS interfaces, performance enhancements, initial KML support, and WorldWind server access. Direct drag and drop of most geospatial formats is also supported. Much of the focus of ossimPlanet will remain on geodetic accuracy, native file formats, and distributed collaboration. This version supports broadcast and listening channels that allow navigation synchronization of multiple clients. An initial users guide can be downloaded from here. The home page for this open source project is located at http://www.ossim.org/." ossimPlanet was introduced here a few months ago, it's an high performance open source virtual globe.

The OSGeo-Discuss mailing list informs us of a new open source satellite imagery processing software named Optiks. The official website. From the article: "Opticks is used by scientists and analysts within the Department of Defense Intelligence Community to analyze remote sensing data and produce actionable intelligence. Opticks supports Imagery, Motion Imagery, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing data." From the OSGeo post: "A couple of observations: 1. The Contributors Agreement (click on the Contributors Agreement link on the left side of the page) is likely rather intimidating for the average open source contributor. 2. It doesn't use GDAL (although it does have OSSIM as a dependency)." This reminds me of the RATS software, recently discussed, and GRASS GIS comes to mind (though GRASS doesn't do hyperspectral?).

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.