gvSIG CE at FOSSGIS 2013

Dear all,

FossGIS 2013 is taking place from 12th - 14th of June `13  in Rapperswil, Switzerland.
All information regarding registration, location and program of the event can be found at [1].

I would like to announce some topics regarding gvSIG CE and invite all of you to join:

- "Geoprozessierung mit Open-Source DesktopGIS": Benjamin Ducke will present gvSIG CE with SEXTANTE and GRASS GIS, which together provide a powerful tool for all matters relating to the theme "geoprocessing":
http://www.fossgis.de/konferenz/2013/programm/events/574.de.html

- "Kartenerstellung und Bearbeiten von Legenden mit gvSIG CE": In this 1.5 hours workshop, Ruth Schönbuchner will give an overview on gvSIG CE capabilites regarding labelling, legend generation and map layout production:
http://www.fossgis.de/konferenz/2013/programm/events/575.de.html

- Share interests and discussion at gvSIG CE BoF (Birds-of-a-Feather)-meeting on thursday, 13th of June `13 room no. 1.271 (table 1):
https://www.fossgis.de/wiki/2013/Sprints_und_BOFs

We are looking forward to meet you at FossGIS in about 2 weeks!
Best regards,
Ruth Schönbuchner

[1] http://www.fossgis.de/konferenz/2013/

Evaluation of how to implement a cartesian coordinate system support (EPSG:5806)

Hi all,
some of the gvSIG CE users need this CRS, so we are evaluating how to implement it.
Please, if you can, read the wiki, add anything you consider important and share your thoughts.
Regards,
Victor.

4 developers more with write access to our SVN

Dear all,
if you haven't followed the gvSIG CE developer list, maybe you don't know that we have now 4 new developers with write access to our SVN. All of them are well known FOSSGIS developers:

- Victor Gonzalez is a Computer Engineer by the Valencia Politechnical University. Victor was awarded with the 52º North Student Innovation Prize in 2009 with the project “SQL Script Profile for 52°North WPS-T”. He has participated in projects like GearScape, GGL, or gvSIG. He is making an amazing work in gvSIG CE since more than one year developing new functionalities, hunting bugs, working on the integration of GeoTools in gvSIG CE, getting the code base into better shape, etc.:
- Export map layouts to raster formats
- Geotools integration methodology
- clean-up work

- Jorge Arévalo is a Computer Engineer by Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, UAM. He has been collaborating with PostGIS and GDAL creating the PostGIS Raster GDAL driver. He has been solving some GDAL related open cases. gvSIG CE has now an amazingly good GDAL drivers support.

- Micho Garcia studied Ocean Sciences at the Vigo University, and has devoted his professional live to GIS development. He has been updating the EPSG database

- Francisco Puga is an ICT engineer by formal training and has participated in several NGOs related to technology, development and free software. He has sent us some patches for the java version of SEXTANTE:
- Models are not loaded by means of the "load button" in the settings
- GridCalculator does not work with models in batch mode
- Error in sextante.history file prevent use the toolbox

We really appreciate the work you are doing.
See you soon
Jose Canalejo

gvSIG CE using GDAL 1.9.2 to read raster data, including ECW, JP2, MrSID and Lidar files

Recently, I've been working for gvSIG CE project, thanks to the folks of geomati.co (I'm part of the team now!). I was solving some GDAL related open cases (this, this and this). the aim is to get a functional and stable gvSIG CE 1.0 version. There are still a couple of cases to solve (this and this), but I think we're pretty close. I'd like to explain what I did to solve these cases.

Make gvSIG CE work with GDAL 1.9.x

This bug was hard to find but easy to fix.  First, a 1-minute introduction to GDAL use in gvSIG CE. gvSIG CE uses a JNI wrapper (based on GDAL 1.7.x GDAL packed JNI wrapper) to make C++ native calls to GDAL library. There are 2 important GDAL JNI wrapper classes involved in most GDAL operations:

Gdal.java (it interacts with native C++ GDALDataset class)

GdalRasterBand,java (it interacts with native C++ GDALRasterBand class)

Both classes inherit from the same base class: JNIBase. This class defines a function named baseSimpleFunctions that calls one of several native C functions, depending on an input parameter. But some of these native C functions are GDALDataset-based, and other are GDALRasterBand-based. I mean, the pointer passed to them doesn't hold the same C structure (wrapping C++ object) in all cases.

And here was the thing. To actually read the raster data, the Java function GdalRasterBand::readRaster is called. This function checks the position and size of the region being accessed, comparing it with the raster dimensions. To check this, the C functions getRasterXSize and getRasterYSize are called. These functions expect a pointer to a GDALDataset C object, but the GdalRasterBand Java class provides a pointer to a GDALRasterBand C object. I had to replace those Dataset-based calls to RasterBand based calls, to match the underlying C structure.

Replace ECW and MrSID driver with GDAL

First, a few comments on these formats. ECW stands for enhanced compression wavelet. This propietary format is a high-performance image-compression format designed specifically for geospatial imagery. It's patented and owned by Intergraph. More information here.

Intergraph provides a license needed SDK for encoding data and a free SDK for reading. Since version 4.1, this free SDK is only available for Desktop development on Windows systems. There are promises to include Linux support since 5.0 version, but gvSIG CE doesn't plan to support ECW and other proprietary formats. So, I worked with the last known version working on Linux systems too. This is 3.3.

About MrSID, it stands for multiresolution seamless image database. It's a proprietary format too, owned by LizardTech. As happens with ECW, there's a free SDK to read MrSID files. It can be downloaded from here (MrSID SDK, under Tools & Utilities. Free register required). And as happens with ECW too, gvSIG CE won't directly support this format. So, it delegates in GDAL.

In both cases, we'll need to compile GDAL with the proper support. So, I had to download and compile MrSID and ECW libraries and build GDAL using --with-ecw and --with-mrsid options.

As there is a JNI wrapper for GDAL, there are JNI wrappers for ECW and MrSID. The goal was: get rid of them, and give GDAL credentials to handle these formats. Four steps involved here:

- Compile GDAL with ECW and MrSID support, as said

- Tell GDAL to take care of those formats for reading (class GdalDriver)

- Unregister ECW and MrSID drivers from gvSIG CE raster library (libRaster)

- Delete ECW and MrSID wrappers and native code.

Once done, you have gvSIG CE using GDAL 1.9.2 to read raster data, including ECW, JP2, MrSID and Lidar files (previously managed by ECW and MrSID drivers).

Jorge Arevalo