Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: NONE Mike,
No shame here on who is funding this. Significant support for libLAS, lasZIP and the development of libPC has been funded through the US Army Corps of Engineers at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab. We are working in Cooperation with NGA (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency) to develop open source tools to support Oracle based storage and retrieval of point clouds in a database environment. This includes development of LAS specific tools, point cloud translation libraries and processing tools. We will continue to support these initiatives into the future as best we can but having support from other commercial, government and individuals is greatly welcome. As Mike said, financial support is always great but having individuals out there helping with development is always appreciated. The recent discussions about what others are doing in the open source community have been great and personally would like to see some of these efforts converge where possible. Best, Dave David C. Finnegan Research Physical Scientist US Army Cold Regions Research & Eng. Lab 72 Lyme Rd Hanover, NH 03755 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael P. Gerlek Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2011 11:25 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Liblas-devel] libLAS/libPC -- looking for funding, sponsorship Do you use libLAS in your products, or would you if it had some additional features you need? If so, please read on. libLAS has been a success, but the world of point cloud support for geospatial applications goes well beyond just reading and writing the LAS format -- we want support for other formats, spatial index integration, a suite of core command line tools, database integration, and so on. To that end, as some of you may have already heard, the lasLAS team has begun work on "version 2" of libLAS, known as libPC. The project goals are: 1. libPC is a library which provides APIs for reading, writing, and processing point cloud data of various formats. Additionally, some command line tools are provided. As GDAL is to 2D pixels, libPC is to multidimensional points. 2. From a market perspective, libPC is "version 2" of libLAS. The actual code base will be different, however, and the APIs will not be compatible. 3. The libPC implementation has high performance, yet the API remains flexible. We recognize that these two goals will conflict at times and will weigh the tradeoffs pragmatically. 4. The architecture of a libPC-based workflow will be a pipeline of connected stages, each stage being either a data source (such as a file reader), a filter (such as a point thinner), or data sink (such as a file writer). 5. The libPC library will be in C++, but will also include a C API and will have SWIG bindings for languages like Python and C#. libPC will support multiple platforms, specifically Windows, Linux, and Mac. 6. libPC is open source and is released under a BSD license. In part with funding from a generous US govt sponsor (not sure if I should name them, sorry), libPC development is already well underway. However, more development needs to happen before it can reach parity with libLAS and start to go into production mode. To do this, of course, your material support is needed. If you use libLAS today in your world -- or if you would like to, if only it had some missing feature -- please consider helping to fund the libLAS team. This can be done in a variety of ways: - "buy" open development time to further the core libPC work - "sponsor" the team to implement a particular feature you need - loan a member of your own development staff to the team for a specific task Please contact me ([email protected]) if you're interested in supporting open source software. -mpg _______________________________________________ Liblas-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/liblas-devel Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: NONE _______________________________________________ Liblas-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/liblas-devel
