General a julia geoscience infrastructure

[Fabian Gans]

Hello,

this is more or less a follow-up on the discussion already started on the user mailing list.

I think there is some consensus that a Julia geo infrastructure would be cool. For my work I would desperately need something like R's raster package that just lets me read data in a variety of formats (probably using GDAL) and puts it into a nice geo-referenced datatype which also includes available metadata. Once we have agreed on such a standard type that is used for geodata, we can continue to write packages that act on this data in a consistent way (also for plotting).

Has anyone already done some work in this direction? Are there different suggestions?

Fabian

[Mauro W]

Upfront: I have very little experience dealing with geo-data properly. But here a few thoughts.

Types of geo-data I'd be interested in:

- raster (1d, 2d and 3d)

- station data (time series at 1 location)

- trajectories (time series at a moving point)

- vector data, like polygons and such (this is probably hard)

The closest I've ever come to deal with these things "properly" is when doing NetCDF data.  The conventions they use there might be of some use/guidance:

http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/documents/cf-conventions/1.6/cf-conventions.html

We could/should build on DataArrays of the DataFrames package as that has support for missing data, and on Calender.jl for time/date.

I couldn't lead such an effort, but I would help a little and would certainly be interested in following the development.

Lastly, better keep it simple to not get overextended like they did with the DataFrame package:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia-users/veg1e6MGgpU/ZLughLeyOfwJ