Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
14
GeoComputation and
Open-Source Software
Components and Software
Component Stacks
Roger S. Bivand
CONTENTS
14.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 330
14.2 Software Component Stacks for GC ..................................................................................... 331
14.2.1 Language Environments ........................................................................................... 332
14.2.2 Component Stacks .................................................................................................... 333
14.2.3 Dependency Challenges............................................................................................ 335
14.3 Open-Source Geospatial Projects ......................................................................................... 336
14.3.1 Geospatial Libraries ................................................................................................. 337
14.3.2 Desktop Applications ................................................................................................ 339
14.3.3 Web Mapping and Services ...................................................................................... 340
14.4 OSGeo and R-Spatial ............................................................................................................ 341
14.4.1 R-Spatial: sp .............................................................................................................. 341
14.4.2 Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL/OGR) and PROJ.4: rgdal ..................344
14.4.3 Geometry Engine, Open Source: rgeos .................................................................... 345
14.4.4 Geographic Resources Analysis Support System: spgrass6 ..................................... 346
14.4.5 SAGA-RSAGA, Geoprocessing (RPyGeo), Marine Geospatial
Ecology Tools and Others ......................................................................................... 349
14.5 Future Prospects ................................................................................................................... 350
References ...................................................................................................................................... 351
GeoComputation (GC), with its necessary focus on software development and methods innovation,
has enjoyed a close relationship with free and open-source software communities. These extend
from communities providing the numerical infrastructure for computation, such as Basic Linear
Algebra Subroutines (BLAS), through language communities around Python, Java and others, to
communities supporting spatial data handling, especially the projects of the Open Source Geospatial
Foundation (OSGeo). This chapter surveys the stack of software components available for GC from
these sources, looking in most detail at the
R
language and environment, and how OSGeo projects
have been interfaced with it. In addition, attention will be paid to open development models and
community participation in software development. Since free and open-source geospatial software
has also achieved a successively greater presence in proprietary software as computational plat-
forms evolve, the chapter will close with some indications of future trends in software component
stacks, using TerraLib as an example.
329
