About the Project

Introduction

osgEarth is a geospatial SDK and terrain engine for OpenSceneGraph applications.

The goals of osgEarth are to:

  • Enable the development of 3D geospatial appliations on top of OpenSceneGraph.
  • Make it as easy as possible to visualize terrian models and imagery directly from source data.
  • Interoperate with open mapping standards, technologies, and data.

So is it for me?

So: does osgEarth replace the need for offline terrain database creation tools? In many cases it does.

Consider using osgEarth if you need to:

  • Get a terrain base map up and running quickly and easily
  • Access open-standards map data services like WMS or TMS
  • Integrate locally-stored data with web-service-based imagery
  • Incorporate new geospatial data layers at run-time
  • Deal with data that may change over time
  • Integrate with a commercial data provider

Community Resources

Since osgEarth is a free open source SDK, the source code is available to anyone and we welcome and encourage community participation when it comes to testing, adding features, and fixing bugs.

Support Forum

The best way to interact with the osgEarth team and the user community is through the support forum. Please read and follow these guidelines for using the forum:

  • Sign up for an account and use your real name. You can participate anonymously, but using your real name helps build a stronger community (and makes it more likely that we will get to your question sooner).
  • Limit yourself to one topic per post. Asking multiple questions in one post makes it too hard to keep track of responses.
  • Always include as much supporting information as possible. Post an earth file or short code snippet. Post the output to osgearth_version --caps. Post the output to gdalinfo if you are having trouble with a GeoTIFF or other data file. List everything you have tried so far.
  • Be patient!

OSG Forum

Since osgEarth is built on top of OpenSceneGraph, many questions we get on the message boards are really OSG questions. We will still try our best to help. But it’s worth your while to join the OSG Mailing List or read the OSG Forum regularly as well.

Social Media

Professional Services

The osgEarth team supports its efforts through professional services. At Pelican Mapping we do custom software development and integration work involving osgEarth (and geospatial technologies in general). We are based in the US but we work with clients all over the world. Contact us if you need help!

License

osgEarth is licensed under the LGPL free open source license.

This means that:

  1. You can link to the osgEarth SDK in any commercial or non-commercial application free of charge.
  2. If you make any changes to osgEarth itself, you must make those changes available as free open source software under the LGPL license. (Typically this means contributing your changes back to the project, but it is sufficient to host them in a public GitHub clone.)
  3. If you redistribute the osgEarth source code in any form, you must include the associated copyright notices and license information unaltered and intact.
  4. iOS / static linking exception: The LGPL requires that anything statically linked to an LGPL library (like osgEarth) also be released under the LGPL. We grant an exception to the LGPL in this case. If you statically link osgEarth with your proprietary code, you are NOT required to release your own code under the LGPL.

That’s it.

Maintainers

Pelican Mapping maintains osgEarth.