Artem Pavlenko's mapnik

Artem is the developer of mapnik, a C++ mapping toolkit, and we have been talking about collaborating on a mapnik-based mapping engine for PCL that might, at a user's preference, be used in place of the current MapServer-based engine. Artem is keen to use Anti-Grain Geometry for rendering. I do not know how its performance compares to GD -- but after a look at the AGG demo page I can not deny that AGG is far more slick and featureful. Mapnik will also include a C++ implementation of OGC-style filters comparable to that of GeoTools.

Depending on how quickly Artem works, and my impression is that he's more productive than I, we may have some results in time for OSG05.