...Object Orientated GIS?
I had a very stimulating conversation with an Archaeological Geographer on Monday. He has a very pragmatic understanding of GIS, and as a result has ended up teaching GIS to a lot of undergrads and masters students. He's the guy I've been looking for since I arrived here, and is happy to give me a bit of one-to-one to save me having to learn the whole field. During the conversation he mentioned GML - a new one on me, but completely logical I suppose. Raster formats are on their way out, and XML descriptions are on their way in. There is still room for raster data, but now it becomes a media type described, along with meaningful relational metadata, in the GML. One of the most interesting aspects of GML is the potential to describe temporal data, meaning walkthroughs of areas at different times should be possible.
This guy does field trips to Western Ireland, taking students on bus trips around the local area. His work in geographical archaeology looks at pollen in core samples, and extrapolates land use in the past. This should be an interesting set of visualisations for the dome. One interesting point he made was the most 'fly through' type visualisations are pretty meaningless, and that a 'walk through', ie from ground level is far more useful to him. He's looking to buy some GIS data from the Irish Ordinance Survey - from a brief bit of research it looks like OS are adopting GML in a big way. They even have some slideshows showing various types of geographical land features and how they are described in GML.
In terms of getting GML into the dome: It looks like GDAL has some support for GML (up to version 2.0) built in already. I've been using OpenSceneGraph with GDAL compiled in to get ESRI shape data in. So the tools are in place already. The bottom line is that since its XML based, you don't have to write a parser from the ground up. Something like libXML should give you all the tools you'd need, with some high level lookup tables to extract the features your after. That still leaves the 3D visualisation, but that's the PhD...
I was also pointed in the direction of UCL's CASA group, who are doing interesting stuff with GIS in gaming engines, we need to get these guys into the dome when its finished...
