Work ahead for JuliaGeo

[Yeesian Ng]

Following a conversation in julia-users, I think it's a good time to revisit the discussion in the ANN/JuliaGeo thread

Current Progress

For anyone who's interested, we have wrappers for the following (major) libraries:

- LibGEOS.jl (to be renamed to GEOS.jl) for GEOS

a) Work-in-progress

- Proj4.jl for PROJ.4

- RasterIO.jl for GDAL/raster (see reasons for the name below)

b) Up-for-grabs

- OGR_Wrapper (to be renamed to OGR.jl) for OGR

c) Related

- NetCDF.jl

- GMT.jl

How to get involved

We should set up a wiki/FAQ for JuliaGeo at some point, that covers guidelines for things to do if you

1. want to develop your own package (and make it more widely known)
2. want to register your package under the JuliaGeo organization
3. are interested in helping out, but don't know where to begin
4. have questions for how a given package should work
5. would like to join the JuliaGeo organization
6. have an event/initiative/etc you'd like to share/announce

[Yeesian Ng]

Oops, forgot to include the reasons for renaming GDAL.jl to RasterIO.jl (I meant to leave this as an issue in the RasterIO.jl pacakge instead):

According to the GDAL website,

traditionally GDAL used to design the raster part of the library, and OGR the vector part for Simple Features. Starting with GDAL 2.0, both sides have been more tightly integrated. You can still refer to the documentation of GDAL 1.X if needed.

Because GDAL is an enormous library, it is easier for us to maintain the distinction between GDAL1.x and OGR when writing the wrappers, and had decided to let

• RasterIO.jl deal only with the raster part of GDAL (the name being suggestive of mapbox/rasterio), and
• OGR.jl deal only with the vector part.

We might remove the distinction between the both of them in the future, and create a meta GDAL.jl package. But there is no immediate urgency, and we lack the developer-time/resources to make it happen.

[Yeesian Ng]

Okay, I've created a meta repository for hosting information on existing libraries, and getting involved. Feel free to improve it or suggest changes!