The User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) project is a proposed open source project under the LocationTech Industry Working Group.

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. Please send all feedback to the LocationTech Discussion email list.

Background

Scope

The scope of uDig is to:

• Produce a Desktop Geographic Information System (GIS) using Eclipse RCP technology. A Desktop GIS application is a general purpose tool, similar to a wordprocessor, that can be put to a wide range of uses. Often the only limitation is the ingenuity of the operator and the data information they have available to work with.

  The Wikipedia entry for Geographic Information System provides the following:

  • Relating information from different sources
  • GIS uncertainties
  • Data Representation
  • Data Capture: ranging from digitisation to automated techniques
  • Raster to vector conversation
  • Projection, coordinate systems and registration
  • spatial analysis with GIS
  • Data output and Cartography
  • Graphical display and techniques
  • Spatial ETL
  • GIS Data Mining

• Provide Eclipse RCP developers an SDK of GIS components. Used by business applications for integration spatial information, rendering or display servies, and in-depth spatial analysis. Allow the business domain model to be extended with minimal background knowledge in mapping. Enable business applications to add "just enough" GIS to get the job done.
• Enable integration of local and external spatial data sources. The rich history, and unusual size, of spatial data presents a great integration challenge. To be effective uDig must remain data provider, and data format, neutral. Respecting where organisations store their information while leveraging international (ISO TC211) and industry (OGC) standards for interoperability.

Description

uDig is an open source desktop application framework, built with Eclipse Rich Client (RCP) technology. uDig provides a complete Java solution for desktop GIS data access, editing, and viewing.

• User friendly: familiar graphical environment for GIS users;
• Desktop appliation: running as a thick client, natively user interface on Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux
• Internet: supporting standard (WMS, WFS, WCS,KML) and de facto (GeoRSS, tiles) geospatial web services
• GIS: framework for spatial data exploration and analysis

Why LocationTech?

The uDig project brings LocationTech an established Eclipse RCP GIS solution with a strong focus on ease-of-use and integration.

The uDig project is well known in the spatial software community and is taking this opportunity to join LocationTech as an outreach to Eclipse RCP developers.

Legal Issues

The project is being submitted to the Eclipse Foundation under a dual EPL and BSD license.

The project includes "GeoTools" components of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation made available under an LGPL license. Other noted dependencies are the Java extensions JAI, ImageIO and ImageIO-Ext.

The use of LGPL components has been negotiated with the LocationTech industry working group and does not represent an issue.

Committers

The following individuals are proposed as initial committers to the project:

Jody Garnett, Open Source Geospatial Foundation, LISAsoft, PSC

Jody is a committer on the uDig project where he has made significant contributions over many years. He will contribute to the architecture and direction of this new project.

Andrea Antonello, HydoloGIS, PSC

Andrea has provided significant contributions to the existing code base. He will contribute scientific guidance and raster expertise to this new project.

Jesse Eichar, Camptocamp, PSC

Jesse Eichar has made significant contributions over many years, acting as project lead for some of that time. Jesse keeps track of the rendering and tools plugins. PSC member.

Mauricio Pazos, PSC

Mauricio is a major contributor to the codebase with a deep understanding of the edit tool framework.

Frank Gasdorf, PSC

Frank has played a strong role in the codebase most recently championing documentation, translation and project OSGi packaging.

Craig Taverner, AmanziTel

GSoC mentor for several projects to build support for the neo4j.org graph database spatial capabilities and bridges to GeoTools, uDig and GeoServer

Davide Savazzi, AmanziTel

GSoC mentor for 2012 project to build support for routing tools in uDig using the neo4j.org graph database. Initial contributor to Neo4j Spatial and uDig plugin for Neo4j Spatial

Naz Chan, LISAsoft

Naz has recently completed the Document view, and is currently working on a Legend view.

Mark Leslie, LISAsoft

Mark longstanding contributor and initial author of the style editor. Mark brings the project a background in Sphinx documentation generation and is available for uDig training courses.

John Hudson, LISAsoft

John has been making uDig plugins for several years and is focused on interoperability with OGC web servies.

Sam Guymer, QPWS

Sam is a new addition to the community who has recently upgraded the version of Tycho used and sorted out various build and packaging issues.

Levi Puntna

Levi is responsible for the recent tool palette work.

Cliff Broadbent, QPWS

Cliff is responsible for the recent transition to the Tycho build system.

Scott Henderson, LISAsoft

Scott is responsible for the recent contribution of ExpressionViewer.

Paul Pfeiffer, QPWS

Paul is responsible for the recent Area of Interest work, and refactoring the core uDig EMF model.

We welcome additional committers and contributions.

Initial Contribution

The initial contribution will be made by the uDig Project Steering Committee. Code ownership is held by Refractions Research under the direction of the uDig Project Steering Committee. Additional "jgrass" plugins made available by HydroloGIS. This is an established development community with world wide representation, drawn from a number of organisations.

GIS Platform: provides a local catalog of spatial services, with minimal Dublin Core details supplemented with a spatial extent. Each listed item implements IResolve operating in a similar fashion to IAdaptable with the additional expectation of both latency and IOErrors. Implementations are provided to work with a range of spatial services from popular file formats, through to spatial databases (such as PostGIS, DB2 and Oracle) and of Open Geospaital Consortium web servies (Web Feature Server, Web Map Server).

GIS Application provides an EMF model for Project, Map and Layer with an implementation of MapViewer to facilitate embedding a map component in RCP apps. This forms the core of the example uDig application we make available to show case the SDK capabilities.

Additional contributions cover raster processing and analysis (ie JGrass), printing and integration.

Mentors

The following Architecture Council members will mentor this project:

• Mentor 1
• Mentor 2

Interested Parties

The following individuals, organisations, companies and projects have expressed interest in this project:

• Refractions Research
• HydroloGIS
• LISAsoft
• Open Source Geospatial Foundation
• AmanziTel

Project Scheduling

This is a live project with responsibility to existing development teams, training courses, and interaction with downstream projects (such as OSGeo Live DVD). It is our intension to transition as quickly as possible and promptly issue a release.

• Q3 2012: Complete transition to Tycho
• Q4 2012: Upgrade to Juno and transition to Eclipse build facilities
• Q1 2013: Initial release

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