Re: [udig-devel] GSoC 2012 - Introduction

[Davide <davide@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 02:49, Carol Hansen <carolbhansen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Davide,
>
> Thank you for your reply! I do not already know Neo4j, but I followed the
> link you gave me and took a look around.

Great. Neo4j is a graph database, so you don't have tables, rows and
columns, but a graph with nodes and relationships between them.
Spatial data, with points, lines and polygons, is more naturally
represented in a graph than in a table. Roads or other transportation
networks, they are a graph. A topology is a graph. That's why we
started the Neo4j Spatial project. Here's the project home page:
https://github.com/neo4j/spatial

> Is this similar to maybe how ArcGIS can utilize Access?

Yes, we can say that uDig is our ArcGIS. It can use many databases and
Neo4j is one of them.

> I am interested in support for OSM data mining capabilities in uDig and
> Geotools. I found the following from uDig's mail archive:
>
> "I am Mirco Franzago, a master course student in computer science. With my
[...]
> I'm not sure how much of this project was completed. If parts of it were
> completed, then we could take it on from where they left off. Should we
> consult the uDig mailing list?

This project hasn't been completed. I'll ask Craig, his mentor and
developer of Neo4j Spatial, if there's something we can save from his
work or if it's better we start from scratch.

An OSM editor would be interesting. A Topology or Network editor would
also be interesting I think, and maybe something that could be done
more easily in the short time of the GSoC?

> Also, what project did you work on when you participated in 2010?

I've worked on Neo4j Spatial, I've developed a GeoTools datasource and
a small uDig plugin, to import data and show shortest path between
points in a network.
http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/UDIG/Neo4j+Spatial+Support

Regards,
-- 
Davide Savazzi