FOSS4G Frank Warmerdam on Vertical Datums

There is a lot more interest in three dimensional surfaces these days and this is also reflected in the open source geospatial world. This afternoon at FOSS4G in Barcelona, Frank Warmerdam gave a talk on the subject of Vertical Datums: Introduction and Software Review to a standing room only audience.

He summarized the different models for elevation measurement including the traditional elipsoidal, tidal and orthometric.  (The image shows the divergence between the geoid (EGM 96) and elipsoidal (WGS 84) models for representing the Earth.) He described some of the challenges in working with vertical coordinate systems, such as the difficulty in relating EPSG to OGC vertical coordinate systems.

The good news for the open source geospatial community is that Frank is working on extending several open source libraries to support vertical datums including

    * Liblas
    * Libgeotiff
    * GDAL
    * PROJ.4

He mentioned that CS-MAP already supports vertical datums and in particular provides extensive transformation grid files (gtx) for transforming between different models.  Proj.4 and CS-MAP are both part of the OSGeo MetaCRS project that Frank chairs.

Geoff Zeiss

Geoff Zeiss

Geoff Zeiss has more than 20 years experience in the geospatial software industry and 15 years experience developing enterprise geospatial solutions for the utilities, communications, and public works industries. His particular interests include the convergence of BIM, CAD, geospatial, and 3D. In recognition of his efforts to evangelize geospatial in vertical industries such as utilities and construction, Geoff received the Geospatial Ambassador Award at Geospatial World Forum 2014. Currently Geoff is Principal at Between the Poles, a thought leadership consulting firm. From 2001 to 2012 Geoff was Director of Utility Industry Program at Autodesk Inc, where he was responsible for thought leadership for the utility industry program. From 1999 to 2001 he was Director of Enterprise Software Development at Autodesk. He received one of ten annual global technology awards in 2004 from Oracle Corporation for technical innovation and leadership in the use of Oracle. Prior to Autodesk Geoff was Director of Product Development at VISION* Solutions. VISION* Solutions is credited with pioneering relational spatial data management, CAD/GIS integration, and long transactions (data versioning) in the utility, communications, and public works industries. Geoff is a frequent speaker at geospatial and utility events around the world including Geospatial World Forum, Where 2.0, MundoGeo Connect (Brazil), Middle East Spatial Geospatial Forum, India Geospatial Forum, Location Intelligence, Asia Geospatial Forum, and GITA events in US, Japan and Australia. Geoff received Speaker Excellence Awards at GITA 2007-2009.

View article by Geoff Zeiss

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