recently came across an interesting new(ish) piece of open source software. It is called Spatial Data Integrator (SDI) and it is essentially an open source version of FME. SDI is based on a non-spatial ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool called Talend Open Studio, as a result of this the base software is very mature and compares favourably with FME. The geospatial components of the software are much less mature and don’t offer enough functionality to be a viable alternative (yet!), however I was able to easily create a simple process to open an existing shapefile, create a buffer around it and output it to a new shapefile.

Watch out for this one.

UPDATE – 5 November 2008

There is now an open source competitor to SDI called GeoKettle, which is based on Pentaho Data Integration.

Email me directly here.