Senior Project - XGOD

Graphics Information, Inc. (GII) provides graphical information systems and data to many of the top oil and gas companies in the US. The current GII software product supports vector display of mapping information, providing energy explorationist's with graphical "point and shoot capabilities at wells, leases and other geographical objects. Once selected, information for the well or lease is displayed.

The goal of this project was to incorporate image/photographic display into the product. This provides display of scanned USGS 7.5 minute topographic maps, aerial photographs, and satellite photographs, as well as engineering drawings of spatial information such as property ownership maps. There are two difficulties with this approach. The first is that the image coordinate systems are typically non-rectangular, but are usually skewed due to the angle from which the image was produced. An algorithm had to be produced to stretch or shrink the image appropriately so that it could be displayed in an exact geodetic coordinate system. This allows the existing GII vector displays to be "overlaid" on the images. The second difficulty is that the map is actually made up of many different images which, when pieced together, form the complete map. The software had to provide the abstraction to the user of a single complete map over which the user could pan, zoom, and rotate. The software was written in C, using the X Window System and Motif user interface toolkit.