The barn is raising

Thanks to the support given by the sponsors of the GDAL SRS barn effort, I have been able to kick in the first works in the past weeks. The work up to now has been concentrated on the PROJ front.

The first step was to set a foundation of C++ classes that implement the ISO-19111 / OGC Topic 2 "Referencing by coordinates" standard. Actually I have anticipated the future adoption of the 18-005r1 2018 revision of the standard that takes into account the latest advances in the modelling of coordinate reference systems (in particular dynamic reference frames, geoid-based vertical coordinate reference systems, etc.), which will be reflected in the corresponding update of the WKT2:2018 standard and future updates of the EPSG dataset. If you are curious, you can skim through the resulting PROJ class hierarchy which is really close to the abstract specification (a number of those classes currenty lack a real implementation for now). With the agreement of the newly born PROJ project steering committee, I have opted for C++11 which offers a number of useful modern features to reduce boilerplate and concentrate on the interesting aspects of the work.

On the functional front, there is already support to read WKT1 (its GDAL variant for now) and WKT2 strings and build a subset of the before mentionned C++ objects. And conversely to dump those C++ objects as WKT1 and WKT2 strings. In particular you can import from WKT1 and export to WKT2, or the reverse (within the limitations of each format). So this abstract modelling (quite close to WKT2 of course) effectively serves its purpose to help being independant from the actual representation of the CRS. As I mentionned an early adoption of the OGC Topic 2 standard, similarly I've taken into account the future WKT2:2018 (OGC 18-010) standard that aligns well with the abstract specification. In the API, the user can select if he wants to export according to the currently adopted version WKT2:2015 (OGC 12-063r5), or with the future WKT2:2018 revision.

The result of those first steps can be followed in this pull request.

Another task that has been accomplished is the addition of the Google Test C++ testing framework to PROJ (thanks to Mateusz Loskot for his help with the CMake integration), so all those new features can be correctly tested locally and on all platforms supported by PROJ continuous integration setup.

There are many future steps to do just on the PROJ front :

• implement remaining classes
• code documentation
• comprehensive support of projection methods (at least the set currently supported by GDAL)
• import from and export to PROJ strings for CRS definitions and coordinate operations
• use of the EPSG dataset