Thursday, September 15, 2011

ESA SOCIS - Coding in the Space Space

The summer of code pattern seems to have become rather popular, pity it is a mis-nomer for us Southern hemisphere folk, that's what you get for the earth being top heavy in landmass ( whoever decided they are on top anyway).

This year the European Space Agency (ESA) is running an SOC event, the catch line being a slight variant of the Copenhagen Interpretation. The two projects I am associated with are:
  1. Orfeo Toolbox SAR Interferometry support - This one is academically of most interest to me, there have been several attempts to develop the interferometry chain in open source, but they have not been properly software engineered, have dubious licensing or other shortcomings. More on this project and the teething issues encountered later.
  2. iGlobe NetCDF support enhancements - This one is professionally of most interest to me. Patrick at NASA recently put us (CSIRO) together with NOAA, NASA and ORNL to build and application tying NetCDF to WorldWind. We are planning to explore large data visualisation techniques and get best possible performance and accuracy. As well as include some analysis capability. The project is code named iGlobe.


These projects will bring my student supervision quota up-to 5 for this year, I have only had them for 3 months and there has been a huge amount work delivered. I wish I had this kind of free labour and velocity at the real workplace.

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