Re: Octave GIS integration

[Philip Nienhuis]

shash wrote
> I was thinking in terms of using gdal/ogr library for reading and writing
> shape and geotiff files.

I wrote the shape* functions in "pure" Octave script code. In general I
think it is less desirable to add dependencies to Octave and Octave-Forge
(the add-on packages) unless it really brings along advantages and option
that can't be obtained without dependencies.

Hopefully it can also be done like I did for spreadsheet I/O support in the
io package: 
rely on "pure Octave" code for basic tasks, and make the dependencies
optional and provide some runtime autodetection of dependency libraries to
switch to if found (automatically or manually).


> I am not looking at mapping functionality at the moment which m_map
> package does. My objective is to provide simple raster and vector data
> support in Octave and maintaining compatibility with Matlab. 

My interests for the time being are mainly visualization of (a set of)
shapefiles as topo background for other stuff; so nothing advanced I think. 
Yet I'd like to have some easily accessible control to how it is shown
(colors, line style, annotations, etc.); looking at the ML docs for
mapshow/geoshow I felt a bit put off in that respect.

ML-compatibility is a goal but also compatibility with the tools we have at
work. Those goals can be (and are) reconciled easily as it mainly concerns
variable formats.


> I looked at the m_map code. I think it will be difficult for me to add
> something to it. I can send you my code which you can put inside m_map if
> you think it can work out. 

I'm no m_Map maintainer... that's an entirely different project than Octave.
Plus, m_Map's code base didn't look inviting to me at first sight either :-)

Could you put up your code somewhere? Agora or the patch tracker, or github?

I just got clipping & interpolating polygons working for
shaperead/BoundingBox option. Next is polylines and and once that all looks
stable I'll push it to the mapping package repo on sourceforge. That may
take some time as I'm heavily occupied at work and privately.

Philip




--
View this message in context: 
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Octave-GIS-integration-tp4667491p4667532.html
Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.