The earliest reference I found to a "promise" of an open specification
for file-gdb was ESRI UC 2006, with discussion where of a forthcoming
public specification mentioned as far back as ArcGIS 8.3.
In many discussions people seem to use the terms open API and open file
format specifications interchangeably. ESRI itself seems to be pretty
clearly sticking to API-only line though, from the 2007 UC:
"While ESRI would ideally like to open the file geodatabase format in a
manner similar to what we did for shapefiles when we released ArcView 2,
geodatabases are complex and can be easily corrupted outside the ArcGIS
environment. Instead, we plan to engineer a high performing and well
documented API that developers can freely embed in custom applications
and that will read and write file geodatabase datasets. This will be
released after ArcGIS 9.3." -- http://bit.ly/esri-uc-qa-2007
If you've a reference for talk of the file fromat spec though I'd love
to see it. Searching for (EMEA) User Conference 2008 shows a few
announcements for the event but no proceedings or blog reports; I'm
likely not using the right keywords.
I also echo the request for people attending *any* ESRI conferences to
ask about both a public file format specifcation and programming API to
the file geodatabase.
best regards,
matt wilkie
--------------------------------------------
Geomatics Analyst
Information Management and Technology
Yukon Department of Environment
10 Burns Road * Whitehorse, Yukon * Y1A 4Y9
867-667-8133 Tel * 867-393-7003 Fax
http://environmentyukon.gov.yk.ca/geomatics/
--------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
gdal-dev mailing list
gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
