[Scilab-Dev] scilab developement ideas

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Hello Lukas,

> Since my beginning days in studying geology the need of an "easy to program" and
> flexible programming environment for general scientific / engineering purpose
> was clear. commercial gis was that time limited to 2d and therefore not really
> useful for earth scientific purposes. Furthermore the vector editing
> functionality of gis was (and in most cases is until now) extremly lousy.
> so that times matlab figured out to be the tool of choise in scientific -
> technical computing with using autocad as a vector editor.
> 
> in the meantime gis systems have become (at least) 3d and with grass a powerful
> open source platform has reached thousands of students and scientists.
> gis functionality is at the moment a wide used task from car navi systems to
> scientific purpose.
> 
> high price commercial software like gocad have developed in the recent years and
> has set the benchmark for geological software.
You should try the Geomodeller [1] from Intrepid Geophysics (which is
now both french and australian now) instead of gocad if you are looking
a good geology/geophysic software.

> 
> so some questions raise immediately:
> 
> do you plan to add opencascade functionality into scilab, would you think this
> is useful?
No, there is no plan like this. Opencascade is far too big and complex
for our uses. 
We will investigate on the visualisation area. We have R&D projects in
this direction in the next few months.

> do you plan to add gis functionality into scilab? Or how could someone with poor
> to average programming skills control grass gis from within scilab? (not at all
> i assume...). have you heard about any such project in a forum?
> 
> will more kitware stuff be linked to scilab (e.g. itk?)
In the future, it is probable that some contributions will go into the VTK area but it is a mid/long shoot. The main of objective of Scilab is numerical computing.


Sylvestre
[1] http://www.geomodeller.com/geo/index.php