Gearscape is GIS focused on geoprocessing that provides a language called GGL (Gearscape Geoprocessing Language). While the first version was based on SQL, the last one (GGL2) is a completely new language that takes ideas from different well known languages (SQL, XPath, imperative languages, etc.) to make geoprocessing easy and reliable.

The typical workflow when working with GGL is:

1. To have a GIS application (GearScape) with some data loaded on it.
2. Execute a processing instruction with GGL.
3. Visualize in the GIS the results of the process.

So far, GearScape was the only GIS application that provided a GGL interpreter but, with the new GGL2, the interpreter has been decoupled and it can be potentially used from any other application. Indeed, as a result of the 2011 summer of code the interpreter has been integrated in gvSIG so it is possible to execute GGL2 scripts from that application.

To get an idea of what GGL2 looks like, take a look at the getting started tutorial in documentation.

Feel free to download the appropiate version for your platform.

You may also want to take a look at the GGL2 blog to get some nice examples.

There are also some videos to ilustrate some of the language features.

Where is Gearscape?

The development of the GIS application called GearScape has been discontinued. The last version of the application was 1.0beta4 and includes the interpreter for the first version of the language. Although it takes few time, there is no plan to integrate the last version of the interpreter in GearScape GIS application so GearScape project becomes just a container project for the GGL language.

The GGL2 development team thinks there is no point in maintaining a GIS application now that the language can be used in gvSIG. In the future, efforts will focus just on improving the integration of GGL2 in gvSIG and other applications.