OSGeo Incubation

Since 2009, OTB has continued to maintain strong link with some OSGeo projects. OTB functionalities are now available as QGIS plugins (through Sextante) and is included in OSGeo Live since 2 years now.

We're still convinced that it would be good for our project to be associated with OSGeo to increase interactions with other projects and perhaps be able to access to OSGeo infrastructure.

I took the time to update all questions of the incubation application Please find below some updates in the ticket.

We look forward to hearing from the Incubation Committee :

The project is the Orfeo Toolbox (OTB) available at http://www.orfeo-toolbox.org. This is a project started by CNES (the French Space Agency) in 2006 to provide open source tools to process satellite images and extract information. There are several links with other OSGeo project such as Gdal and ossim, QGIS. The project is currently released under the CeCILL license (compatible with GPL).

From reading the OSGeo website, I understand that there is an incubation process. Here are the answers to the Incubator Application Questionnaire (http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/application.html).

Incubation application questionnaire

• Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner *

Julien Michel (julien.michel@…)

• Please provide the names and emails of co-project owners (if any). *

Manuel GRIZONNET (manuel.grizonnet@…) Julien Malik (julien.malik@…)

• Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all official committers *

cf http://www.ohloh.net/p/otb/contributors?page=1 from CNES, CS (mostly under a contract with CNES), Telecom Bretagne, Google, National Technical University of Athens...

• Please describe your Project. *

Provide open source tools to process satellite images and extract information

• Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project? *

It would be good for our project to be associated with OSGeo (public awareness, quality control and cooperation with other OSGeo projects like QGIS or Grass). It would be also really interesting to get an access to the OSGeo infrastructure (website, mailing list...)

• Type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.): *

Library with some applications with Graphical User Interfaces (OTB-Applications and Monteverdi)

• Please describe any relationships to other open source projects. *

Intensive use of ITK, Gdal and ossim. OTB applications are also available through Quantum GIS plugins (through the Sextante plugin)

• Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products. *

• Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under? *

CeCILL (GPL compatible)

• Is there already a beta or official release? *

Current release is 3.14.1 for OTB and 1.12.1 for Monteverdi.

• What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)? *

Ggovernment (the project is mostly funded by the CNES the French Space Agency)

• Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, ect.) Has the software been certified to any standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the project owners to seek certification at some point? *

OTB supports open data standard through GDAL and OGR.

• Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright? *

The code is free of patents and trademarks and the copyright is controlled by CNES

• How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time? *

Around 10 people currently contributing

• How many people have commit access to the source code respository? *

Distributed source control is used (mercurial) so some people are participating through other members of the team. Currently 20 people have a push access to the main repository (including 6 from CS under contract with CNES).

• Approximately how many users are currently using this project? *

That's hard to evaluate. For now, there is still not so many people who get a access to Very High Resolution remote sensing image (even if OTB can process other type of data). We observed a significantly increase of the number of downloads since 2010. The availability of binary packages (on Linux, Windows, Mac) helps a lot to increase the number of OTB users.

• What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )? *

Government, academic research, company

• If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation? *

We intend if it is possible to host portion of the project using the OSGeo infrastructure and we are convinced that the incubation of OTB will really increase interactions with other projects of the foundation

• Does the project include an automated build and test? *

cmake and ctest with a nightly submission of more that 2600 tests on more than 10 different platforms (see dash.orfeo-toolbox.org/).

• What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc) *

Mostly C++ with availability of python binding...

• What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers? *

English

• What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How many users do you expect to download the project when it is released? *

28 MB for the source, 14 MB for the windows binary release. Around 3000 downloads for the latest release on sourceforge ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/orfeo-toolbox/files/), but the files are available from other sources as well.

We look forward to hearing from the Incubation Committee and moving our application forward