Autodesk, Inc. has announced the availability of new providers developed on Feature Data Object (FDO) open data access technology. FDO technology, originally created by Autodesk and now a fully endorsed project in the open source community through the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), allows users to store, retrieve, update, and analyze geospatial data.
The new providers include two new Autodesk FDO Providers: Autodesk FDO Provider for GE Smallworld and Autodesk FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, which are now available through the Autodesk subscription program for AutoCAD Map 3D and Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise. The FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will also become available on OSGeo through the FDO open source project. In addition, new FDO Providers for IBM Informix, KML, and PostGIS have been developed by the open source community. The latest FDO Providers allow customers to take advantage of the native support for additional spatial data formats -- and let users more easily access, view, edit and analyze data -- within Autodesk geospatial software.
Autodesk and Open Source
Autodesk is a sustaining sponsor of OSGeo. To date, Autodesk has provided source code for its CS-Map coordinate system technology, MapGuide Open Source and FDO. There have been over 74,000 downloads of MapGuide Open Source since it graduated from the OSGeo incubation period in 2007. Similarly, FDO has been downloaded over 44,000 times.
