New GeoTrellis Release Made Official: 0.7.0 “Asgard”

New GeoTrellis Release Made Official: 0.7.0 “Asgard”

GeoTrellis masters Josh Marcus and Erik Osheim have been hard at work over the last few months, and it’s paid off in GeoTrellis version 0.7.0, the newest release of our high performance geoprocessing framework.  Named for the mythical city ruled by the Norse Gods, “Asgard” has 301 changed files, 10,566 new lines of code, and 7,385 deleted lines when compared to version 0.6.0.

Among the improvements:

  • Powerful new support for extremely large rasters through tiled raster data classes
  • New map/reduce-style definition of operations for data parallelism on large raster data
  • Support for a range of new raster data types for efficient memory utilization and performance improvements
  • Significant speed improvements through lazy evaluation
  • Improved geoprocessing operation hierarchy and operation naming scheme
  • Modernized benchmark structure with many new performance benchmarks, including tiled raster tests
  • First class support for floating point raster data values, with floating point raster interface, support in core operations for floating point values, and implementation of floating point ARG formats
  • The getting started documentation has been significantly expanded and improved (http://azavea.github.com/geotrellis/getting_started/GeoTrellis.html)
  • Executable geotrellis tools can now be installed via conscript
  • The geotrellis template has moved to the github repository geotrellis.g8, and can now be installed using giter8

In addition, David Zwarg recently contributed support for the Azavea Raster Grid (ARG) format to GDAL. Using a recent build of GDAL, users are able to convert from other raster formats into ARG and vice versa. Future releases of GDAL will contain this ARG support, bringing it to other tools like QGIS which use GDAL internally.

New code examples in the Getting Started documentation show you how to write operations like geographical Bounding Box Union and how to draw rasters, making it easy to start experimenting. Visit GeoTrellis on GitHub and dig into the new release!