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Minotis is an open source Java library that provides tools for drawing maps in your application.

What is Minotis and what does it do?

Minotis was originally conceived as a high performance Java library for drawing vectorial geographic maps. It is however a general drawing library and could be used to draw data that is not geographic (such as mind maps or electronic device maps for instance).

On a more historical point of view, Minotis is one of the legendary submerged suburbs of Alexandria, in Egypt.

Key features:

  • Flexibility:
    Minotis provides default implementations to display common data types (points, polylines, polygons) and can be easily extended to support new data types. Each data type can be represented in many ways. Default representations are provided as well (point drawing, point text drawing…).
  • Attributes:
    Minotis provides an attributes system to assign properties to data types (isobaths depth, river names, etc.)
  • Layers:
    Minotis uses layers to display data and these layers can be ordered, shown or hidden.
  • Rotation:
    Minotis natively supports data rotation on screen.
  • Performance:
    Minotis has been optimized to display efficiently large sets of data. For some data models, it implements Level Of Detail algorithms to improve display performance.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the WindRose, Minotis GIS demonstration application

Who is behind Minotis

Minotis is the result of a co-development effort between IFREMER, the French Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (http://www.ifremer.fr/anglais/), and Artenum (http://www.artenum.com), an independent company specialized in scientific software development. IFREMER owns the intellectual property rights of Minotis and already uses it intensively in their bathymetry pre-processing tools, the BMGTools (http://www.ifremer.fr/bmgtools/).

Figure 2: BMGTools screenshot

How much does it cost?

Minotis is an open source project. It is thus free to use and distribute in your own project under the terms of the LGPL licence (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html).

How can I get it?

Minotis can be downloaded from the project web site, located at http://dev.artenum.com/projects/Minotis/download .

What else do I need to use it?

  • System requirements
As a Java library, Minotis can be used on any operating system that supports the version 6 of the Java Platform. This includes (but is not limited to):
  • Windows (XP, Vista, 7)
  • MacOS X (Leopard, Snow Leopard)
  • Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora)
  • Software requirements
To compile Minotis, it is necessary to have the following software properly installed and configured on your operating system: To function properly, Maven needs an active Internet connection.

How can I contribute?

Minotis is an open source project. Help is always welcome. You can help develop new models, new painters or just give us feedback about what you think of the library in the forum.

How can I get help?

If you encounter any problem with Minotis or WindRose, please visit Minotis forum and post your questions there. If you find a bug or whish to have so key feature implemented, post it on Minotis bug tracker, also located on Minotis community website. If you would like us to develop a customized feature or to integrate Minotis in your project, feel free to visit Artenum website at http://www.artenum.com/EN or to contact us at contact(at)artenum(dot)com.

(c) IFREMER, Brest, France 2008-2010

Developed by Artenum

Last edited by Benoît Thiébault at Jul 8, 2010 7:30 AM - Edit content