Geotoolkit Incubation Application

The Geotoolkit project (http://www.geotoolkit.org) is building the Geotoolkit library, a Java language library for geospatial applications focused on the ISO and OGC geospatial interoperability standards. The project explicitly focuses on maintaining a high level of quality of the library code.

Geotoolkit source code is copyright of OSGeo and licensed to all under the terms of the LGPL version 2.1.

Application for OSGeo Incubation
Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.


 * Martin Desruisseaux  (Lead Maintainer)
 * OSGeo (Copyright holder)

Please provide the names and emails of co-project owners (if any).

none

Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all official committers.

''NB: Geotoolkit uses the Mercurial distributed version control system, so there is no notion of official committers. The closest idea is the cannonical tree from which we all pull along the way. However, every programmer or group is responsible for their own repository.''


 * Martin Desruisseaux 

Please describe your Project.

Geotoolkit is a Java language geospatial library aiming to provide a full implementation of the data model in the ISO/OGC standards. Currently Geotoolkit can instantiate and manipulate Metadata objects which conform to the ISO 19115 schema and can convert those objects to and from the ISO 19139 XML schema. Geotoolkit can also construct the referencing objects from the ISO 19111 specification, notably using the definitions of the EPSG database, and implements coordinate conversions between the different Reference Systems in that database.

Geotoolkit is a fork of the GeoTools library with a greater emphasis on code quality, with the intent to follow more closely the evolution of the Java language, with the intent to stay independent of the needs of any derivative project, with the desire to use a distributed versioning system for increased flexibility of users and developers, and with the aim to maintain a collaborative environment based foremost on technical argument and merit.

Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project?

OSGeo is the natural custodian of the Geotoolkit project since it already owns the copyright to all the code, since many of the developers have been involved with OSGeo over the past years, and because the aims of Geotoolkit closely match the aims of the foundation---building free software for geospatial communities.

We expect to benefit from the OSGeo community to extend the participation and use of our library and expect to rely on OSGeo infrascture for our project mailing list.

Type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.):

Geotoolkit is a software library.

Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.

Geotoolkit is an implementation of the GeoAPI interfaces.

Geotoolkit is the basis for the Swing desktop application PuzzleGIS, for the JEE server application Constellation, for the JEE server application MDWeb, and the Java Server Faces based project MapFaces. It is also expected to be adopted by several other free software projects, notably a desktop application in a French research laboratory and a commercial application in a South African company.

Geotoolkit is a fork of the GeoTools library.

Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.

Several of the initial members of the Geotoolkit project are affiliated with the french company Geomatys. There is one known commercial product being developed based on Geotoolkit.

Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?

Geotoolkit uses the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.

Is there already a beta or official release?

Geotoolkit is released every day and available from the project web site:

http://www.geotoolkit.org/

but there have been no official releases yet made of the project.

What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)?

Geotoolkit originated in the master's thesis of James Macgill at the University of Leeds and in the doctoral thesis of Martin Desruisseaux at the french research agency l'Institut de Recherche pour le Dévelopment. The project history page has more details:

http://www.geotoolkit.org/history.html

'''Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, ect.) Has the software been certified to any standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the project owners to seek certification at some point?'''

Geotoolkit aims to implement a library which fully covers the ISO/OGC core standards, including notably the ISO 19000 series of standards. The project is closely affiliated with the GeoAPI project which is defining standard interfaces in the Java language for anyone implementing these ISO/OGC standards.

The project currently supports many of the ISO/OGC core standards including those for metadata and geospatial referencing, notably ISO 19103, ISO 19115, and ISO 19111.

The project is planning and currently prototyping other standards including the ISO 19107 vector geometry standard and the ISO 19109 feature and coverage model.

The project has been used to build servers which have passed several of the CITE tests.

Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright?

To the best of our knowledge, the code is free of patents and trademarks.

Copyright to the code is held by the OSGeo Foundation as per the contributor agreements signed by all those who have contributed to the library when it was part of GeoTools. All of those who have worked on the library since the change of name expect to sign a similar agreement with OSGeo upon acceptance into incubation.

How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time?

About five developers currently contribute directly to Geotoolkit today and several others are expected to join in the near future.

How many people have commit access to the source code repository?

One person will be responsible for all commits into the repository.

The project uses the Mercurial distributed versioning system so every developer has a full, independent copy of the repository including all its history. Commit access therefore bestows more of a burden on the committer than any privilege.

Approximately how many users are currently using this project?

About thirty different users in ten organizations are currently known to use the project and half a dozen other organizations and projects are currently evaluating the project.

What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )?

The main users of Geotoolkit are commercial, governmental, research, and academic.

Geotoolkit is being used as the foundation of several other free software projects marketed by small commercial startup companies. The library forms the basis of enterprise servers used by French governmental agencies, including a maritime research group, a geological research agency, and several groups in developmental research and extension. The library is also being used to teach students at a regional university in the south of France.

If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation?

We are currently hosting our mailing list at the foundation, at http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/geotoolkit.

The project is also open to being hosted at any site. In previous discussions, it has been clear that there would be a cost to the OSGeo community to learn to support the Mercurial system but that is something the project would willingly consider.

The project would happily use the OSGeo maven repository as one location for deployment of Geotoolkit binaries for reuse by other projects.

Does the project include an automated build and test?

The project is automatically built, tested and deployed every night by the Hudson build tool. The latest build information is available here: http://hudson.geomatys.com/job/GeoToolkit/

'''What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)'''

The project code is in the Java language. The project includes minor elements written in other languages such as the Maven build configuration files written in XML.

What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?

The core developers work in French and in English. There are occasional echoes of Spanish and Italian.

'''What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How many users do you expect to download the project when it is released?'''

A full clone of the repository including the entire history is 11MB in size. The clone with a working copy is 29MB. A Java archive (JAR) file containing all of the project artifacts is under 10MB in size.

We expect most users to obtain the library using the Maven build tool. We expect eleven different projects and groups to obtain the code immediately after its initial release

Application Status
April, 26th 2009 --- Initial Application