How I wished you did not asked me this question...but here we go:

OpenMap and GeooTools are architecturally (framework, approach) different.
From my point-of-view as a software engineer, while both adheres to OGC
(OpenGIS Consortium) standards, one has a distinct advantage over the other
-- it all depends on what you want to achieve and your programming style (or
preference).

To make a long story short, I will prefer to use GeoTools to read digital
maps (raster and vector) to generate the agents, set attributes and do
spatial analysis (geostatistics) of intermediate results.

If in the course of my work, I find the need to generate a user-interactive
display of the digital maps, I will very likely employ OpenMap (a clear
advantage of OpenMap to date) -- but very unlikely I will go this far
because there are hundreds of packages out there that can do the same job
with great accuracy and efficiency.

I do not know what Robert (Najlis) did for RePast but I will not be
surprised if he used both.

Felimon

-----Original Message-----
From: MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sean Luke
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 2:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Mason and GIS

On Jan 6, 2005, at 11:44 AM, Felimon Gayanilo wrote:

> I barely started my technical evaluation of MASON...but the answer to
> your
> first question is (theoretically), yes. An open source (Java-based)
> project
> called, GeoTools (now on its second release) has more than enough
> stable
> classes to read, display, manipulate and save digital maps. The
> project URL
> where you can download the required files is at:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/geotools/

In interest of discussion, how would you compare this to OpenMap?

        http://openmap.bbn.com/

...and no, I know next to nothing about these packages :-)

Sean