My name is Adhitya Kamakshidasan and I recently graduated from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India. I will be working on the Google Summer of Code 2016 project “Terrain Model Generation and Analysis” under the able guidance of Professor Dr. Benno Schmidt (Hochschule Bochum) and Christian Danowski (52°North).

The 52°North Triturus library is extremely powerful and provides a lot of functionalities. This library is used in a lot of interesting projects such as the 52°North terrainServer and the 52°North WorldViz. Currently, the terrainServer offers web-based services providing perspective terrain views. The idea of this project is to extend terrain model generation and analysis to practical scenarios, where it would be desirable to have web-based access to tools (e.g., difference surfaces, mass calculations, inclination analysis) and to model generation functions, using the 52°North Triturus library. In the Google Summer of Code 2016 program, we shall try to achieve web-based access for some of these tools. This new module will be named ‘terrainTools’ and will be a standalone project.

It’s preliminary system architecture is depicted in the following figure:

At the end of the project, we would have successfully done the following

• Design and implement a user-specific model access concept (including server side model management) and multi-model support for the 52°North terrainTools.
• Design and specify proper terrain service interfaces.
• Implement missing flooding analysis, cross-sections and difference modelling functions in the 52°North Triturus library needed for terrainTools using the grid generation functions.
• Design and implement a demo web client (HTML5/JavaScript) and test the application with sample point data (XYZ) and a browser-based X3DOM visualization

Last year, I had the opportunity of working with 52°North within the scope of the WorldViz project. I learned extensively about the power of the Triturus library and directly used it while building WorldViz. I was fascinated with the scope that it has and that’s why I’m returning this year, to extend the capabilities of the Triturus Library.

You can follow the progress of this project here.