Dear Maintainer, My PAUSE ID is SORO. I want to request a name space GISI:: on CPAN and contribute following modules: Name DSLI Description Info ------------- ---- -------------------------------------------- ----- GISI ampO Geographic Information Systems Interface SORO GISI::SHAPE amcO ArcView SHAPE file format driver SORO GISI::MIFMID ampO MapInfo MIFMID file format driver SORO Project developers: Alexandre Sorokine ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Kurt Ackermann ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Project page: http://gisi-pm.sourceforge.net/ Additional information (from GISI pod): =head2 What is GISI? GISI stands for 'Geographic Information System Interface'. GISI is an experimental object-oriented API (Application Programming Interface) to access spatial data from Perl programs. GISI intention is to define a set of classes and conventions to provide a consistent interface to access spatial data independent of underlying file format or access method. GISI is based on the OpenGIS Abstract Specification Version 4 (http://www.opengis.org/). Similar to L<Perl DBI>, GISI is an interface layer providing communication between Perl scripts utilizing GISI and drivers that provide actual access to the sources of spatial data. All effort was done to keep GISI thin and limit its scope to the data access purposes. GISI is sought to be a glue between various pieces of the GIS software and libraries written in a variety of programming language, including but not limited to Perl. =head2 Architecture GISI as implemented as a set of Perl modules of 'core GISI' and optional drivers. GISI itself performs the following actions: loading of the specified driver(s), dispatching its method calls to the drivers and error checking/handling. All other actions should be implemented outside of the GISI driver loader although they can share GISI data model. The drivers implement support for a given type of a spatial data sources that can be a file in some format, a database server or almost anything else. In term of the abstract model of spatial data GISI relies on the OpenGIS Abstract Specification, Version 4. The best way to get a good understanding of the matter is to download the specification and read in GISI: [skipped...] =cut Discussions and publicity: GISI.pm under the current name and architecture has been under development for almost 2 years and some pieces of its code may be traced back even to 1994. Originally it was a set of Perl scripts to convert between various GIS (Geographic Information Systems) formats, later they were rewritten as modules and unified around the model of the OpenGIS Abstract Specification (http://www.opengis.org/techno/specs.htm). We had made a presentation about GISI.pm at the Technical Committee meeting of the OpenGIS Consortium (http://www.opengis.org/) this June. Also we will be presenting a paper concerning GISI.pm design philosophy and surrounding software architecture issues at the ACMGIS Symposium on November 9-11 in Washington DC (http://acmgis.cs.pusan.ac.kr/html/acmgis2000/index.html). Best Regards, -- Alexandre Sorokine Department of Geography SUNY at Buffalo mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]