TerraLib is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 GIS

Geographic Information System

A geographic information system, geographical information science, or geospatial information studies is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data...

 software library that extends object-relational DBMS technology to handle spatiotemporal data types. The library supports different DBMS, including MySQL

MySQL

MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

, PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...

, and Oracle

Oracle database

The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....

. Its vector data model is upwards compliant with OGC

Open Geospatial Consortium

The Open Geospatial Consortium , an international voluntary consensus standards organization, originated in 1994. In the OGC, more than 400 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide collaborate in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open...

) standards. TerraLib supports the development of geographical applications using spatial database

Spatial Database

A spatial database is a database that is optimized to store and query data that is related to objects in space, including points, lines and polygons. While typical databases can understand various numeric and character types of data, additional functionality needs to be added for databases to...

s.

The design goal for TerraLib is to support large-scale applications using socioeconomic and environmental data. It handles spatiotemporal data types (events, moving objects, cell spaces, modifiable objects) and allows spatial, temporal and attribute queries on the database. TerraLib supports dynamic modelling in generalized cell spaces and has a dynamic link with the R programming language for statistical analysis. It handles large image data sets. TerraLib is implemented as a library of C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

 classes and functions, written in ANSI

Ansi

Ansi is a village in Kaarma Parish, Saare County, on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia....

-C++, and has programming interfaces in Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 and Visual Basic

Visual Basic

Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...

.

TerraLib has a core development team based in Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

. The team includes the Image Processing Division of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, and the Computer Graphics Technology Group of the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. TerraLib is licensed as open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 according to the LGPL

GNU Lesser General Public License

The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...

.

Using TerraLib, the INPE team developed the TerraView

TerraView

TerraView is an GIS application built on the TerraLib GIS library. TerraView handles vector data and raster data , both of them stored in a relational or geo-relational database, including ACCESS, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle Spatial...

 open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 GIS, which provides functions for data conversion, visualization, exploratory spatial data analysis, spatial statistical modelling and spatial and non-spatial queries. Another application is TerraAmazon, Brazil’s national database for monitoring deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest

Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon Rainforest , also known in English as Amazonia or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf forest that covers most of the Amazon Basin of South America...

. It handles more than 2 million complex polygons and 60 GB

Gigabyte

The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...

of remote sensing images.

External links

• TerraLib web site - Official project web site.