We are thrilled that GeoTrellis, our open source software framework for fast spatial data processing, has been accepted for three Google Summer of Code projects this summer. Google received 6,313 proposals from 4,420 students and awarded almost 2,000 fellowships to open source projects around the world. Each Summer of Code fellow works on an open source project to implement a single significant feature.
We submitted GeoTrellis to the Eclipse Foundation’s LocationTech initiative in December 2013. The Eclipse Foundation was awarded several Summer of Code fellowships and allocated three to GeoTrellis. The fellows who will work on the project come from all over the globe while Rob Emanuele and Eric J. Christeson of North Dakota State University will serve as mentors.
Johan Stenberg from the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, will be working on a GeoTiff reader written in native Scala. The goal will be to have a flexible reader of the GeoTiff format that performs better than any other JVM-based reader. This will allow GeoTrellis to easily add GeoTiffs as native format alongside the existing ARG file type, as well as supporting importing GeoTiffs on HDFS (the Hadoop distributed file system).
Kelum Deshapriya from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, will be working on support for a multi-band imagery in GeoTrellis. Satellite imagery and other data are often captured and stored in multiple bands, with each band representing a different wavelength of light. Kelum’s work will add support for processing of multi-band imagery.
T. Tharindu Madushanka Peiris from the University of Colombo School of Computing, Sri Lanka, will be working on a mechanism for converting text-based descriptions of geospatial operations into executable code on the GeoTrellis platform. This will enable software to be written in other languages and take advantage of the full power of GeoTrellis without having to program in Scala or Java.
Being part of Google Summer of Code this year is particularly exciting to us because we will be getting valuable contributions to the project while at the same time, it will enable us to mentor a new generation of open source developers.
For more information about GeoTrellis, visit: http://geotrellis.io/ , and Google Summer of Code: https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2014