Effective Geospatial Code in OCaml [part-ii-geocaml]

This project is co-supervised with Michael Dales.

Geospatial processing is critical in environmental science and is used in a range of environmental scenarios, both in areas of carbon accounting like digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification in Reforestation Carbon Removal, and also biodiversity analysis like calculating worldwide extinction rates.

However there are problems with the current state of affairs, Python is one of the most popular data science libraries, and when doing geospatial data science with Python you use the GDAL geospatial data library. This workflow is not ideal [2]. For environmental scientists, interacting with the geospatial data in the imperative way that Python requires can be very difficult, and it is also not designed for the scale of computation needed for large geospatial projects. Furthermore, Python’s dynamic type system means that tricky type errors due to heterogeneity of data points can go unchecked. GDAL also only allows synchronous IO for loading GeoTIFF files, which can hurt performance.

I will write a non-blocking library for reading GeoTIFF files in OCaml (built on top of the WIP OCaml-TIFF library1 written by one of my supervisors, Patrick Ferris). I will then use OCaml to write an embedded Domain Specific Language (eDSL) which will be used to interact with geospatial data in a declarative way.