In 2002, as a project for the British Columbia Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management, Vivid Solutions Inc. created a software program to do automated matching of roads and rivers from different digital maps into an integrated single geospatial data set. The software team wisely made the program flexible enough to be used not just for roads and rivers, but almost any kind of spatial data: provincial boundaries, power-station locations, satellite images, and so on. The program was named JUMP, and it has become a popular, free Geographic Information System. After the initial creation and deployment of JUMP, regular development of the program by Vivid Solutions stopped. However, the company continued offering support to the user community that had grown around JUMP, and provided information to developers that had begun to improve JUMP in small ways, or who had customized it to fit their needs. Martin Davis and Jon Aquino, two former employees of Vivid Solutions that worked on the original JUMP, played a key role in the growth of this community centered on JUMP. It soon became evident that both the users and developers would benefit from a "unified" JUMP platform. This central or core platform would eliminate the compatibility issues that plagued the JUMP user community, and would give developers a platform on which to focus and coordinate their efforts. A number of the lead members from each team working with JUMP formed the JPP Development Committee, whose purpose was to guide and oversee this new unified platform. A name was chosen for this open source GIS program to be based on JUMP, "OpenJUMP".
File formats
One important feature of Jump and OpenJUMP is the ability to work with GIS data in GML format. GML or "Geography Markup Language" is an XML format for GIS data. It is a way to describe spatial information in a human readable form, and is an accepted "open standard" for GIS data. OpenJUMP can currently read and write GML data, and the team hopes to develop a number of utilities that will improve OpenJUMP's ability to work with GML. The ability to work with an open format like GML is important to implementers because it gives alternatives to proprietary formats like Autodesk DWG files or ESRI Shapefiles. OpenJUMP nevertheless also reads and writes ESRI Shapefiles and supports ESRI ASCII grid format with an OpenJump plugin from the SIGLE team. While OpenJUMP is considered primarily a vector based GIS, it also supports rasters, as TIF files or the above ESRI ASCII grid.
