18 March 2009

Anaconda Workbench: A uDig Application

Now here is a glimpse at what we are using uDig for. I think all the digging in the internals of several Open Source projects is now beginning to pay off.

The Anaconda Workbench is an application for viewing and testing car navigation databases in the forthcoming Navigation Data Standard format (NDS). (This is a closed source project of Harman/Becker, so I cannot offer more than some general information here.)

We implemented a Geotools extension for the NDS format, and a corresponding uDig catalog plug-in. This was enough to build an NDS map viewer. The map has multiple levels of detail in separate layers. We use SLD for styling the layers and for activating the appropriate layer depending on the current map scale.

On top of the map viewer functionality, there is a name browser which allows you to select road names and display the road on the map or use it as a start or destination for a route.

There is also a route calculator plug-in which finds the shortest route between two points and highlights the route in a separate layer.

More functionality will be added step by step. In the end, the Anaconda Workbench shall become a front-end for our map compilation process and not just a viewer for the compiled map databases.

4 comments:

Tisham Dhar said...

You seem to be taking a break from OSGi related activities, I have started using your Geotools OSGi bundles in our project (http://www.emg.cmar.csiro.au/www/en/emg/software/Visualization/DIVE.html) which aims to build support for NetCDF format and render in WorldWind. The install from the mvn build to the local repository.xml(OBR) does not seem to be progressing properly. We may yet get UDig into a more modular structure. JBoss provides an interceptor bundle to handle SPI http://jbossosgi.blogspot.com/2010/01/suns-serviceloader-and-how-it-relates.html, I will have a look at that as well.

Harald Wellmann said...

It's true, I haven't worked with Geotools or uDig for some time, having moved to new projects and companies. But I do still work with OSGi.

I'm not aware of any users of geotools-osgi outside of Harman and partner companies, but the general idea of our branch always has been to work towards a merge with the mother projects.

We never used the OBR, so if there are any problems, we probably never noticed them.

If you're interested, I can get you into touch with the current maintainers.

Viktor Samokhin said...

Hi! I would like you to ask about adding me to member lists of the following projects: GeoAPI for OSGi, Geotools for OSGi, uDig for OSGi. Currently I am working for Harman and sometimes need to integrate bug fixes and updates into the projects specified.

My user profile on BerliOS is here: http://developer.berlios.de/users/vsamokhin

Thank you in advance!

Harald Wellmann said...

@Viktor: I've added you to the three projects. Have fun!