mercredi 29 août 2018

SRS barn raising: 3rd report

This is the third progress report of the GDAL SRS barn effort.

In the last month, the main task was to continue, and finish, the mapping of all GDAL currently supported projection methods between their different representations as WKT 2, WKT 1 and PROJ string: LCC_2SP, LCC_2SP_Belgium, Modified Azimuthal Equidistant, Guam Projection, Bonne, (Lambert) Cylindrical Equal Area,    GaussSchreiberTransverseMercator, CassiniSoldner, EckertI to VI, EquidistantCylindricalSpherical, Gall, GoodeHomolosine, InterruptedGoodeHomolosine, GeostationarySatelliteSweepX/Y, International Map of the World Polyconic, Krovak North Oriented and Krovak, LAEA, Mercator_1SP and Mercator_2SP, WebMercator (including GDAL WKT1 import/export tricks), Mollweide, ObliqueStereographic and Orthographic, American polyconic, PolarSterographicVariantA and PolarSterographicVariantB, Robinson and Sinusoidal, Stereographic, VanDerGrinten, Wagner I to VII, QuadrilateralizedSphericalCube, SphericalCrossTrackHeight, Aitoff, Winkel I and II, Winkel Tripel, Craster_Parabolic, Loximuthal and Quartic_Authalic

The task was tedious, but necessary.  For some cases, this involved cross-checking formulas in the EPSG "Guidance Note 7, part 2 Coordinate Conversions & Transformations including Formulas", PROJ implementation and Snyder "Map Projections - A Working Manual" because of ambiguities in some projection names. Typically the ObliqueStereographic in EPSG is not the Oblique Stereographic of Snyder. The former is implemented as the Oblique Stereographic Alternative (sterea) in PROJ, and the later as the Oblique Stereographic (stere). The parameter names in WKT 2 / EPSG tend also to be much more specific that in GDAL WKT 1. When in GDAL WKT1, you have mostly a "latitude_of_origin" parameter mapping to the lat_0 PROJ parameter, in WKT2, parameter names tend to better reflect the mathematical characteristics of the projection, distinguishing between "Latitude of natural origin", "Latitude of projection centre" or "Latitude of false origin"

The currently ongoing task is now to implement a method that takes a PROJ string and builds ISO-19111 corresponding objects. Done for GeographicCRS (+proj=longlat), in progress for Projected CRS. When this will be completed we will have the infrastructure to convert in all directions between PROJ strings, WKT 1 and WKT 2

When digging into PROJ code, I also uncovered a number of issues in the Helmert implementation (confusing for rotational parameters regarding the "Position Vector" vs "Coordinate frame" convention), the handling of the not-so-well-known +geoc flag for geocentric latitudes and the handling of vertical units for geographic CRS with the new PROJ API. All of those fixes have been independantly merged in PROJ master, so as to be available for the upcoming PROJ 5.2.0, which should be released around mid-september (to remove any confusion, this release will not include yet all the WKT 2 related work)