Geodyssey Limited and Hipparchus Library

Geodyssey Limited was a private software development corporation, founded in 1992 by Hrvoje Lukatela and John Russell, funded exclusively through the investment of its principals and the revenues from its technology sales. It was operating world-wide from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Geodyssey's principal product was a software Library of C language geodetic and cartographic "primitives", named Hipparchus. The product's target market were other software developers, building computer systems and applications that dealt with the "where of things", requiring highest possible spatial precision, while operating on a continental or planetary scale.

Hipparchus library used a novel approach to computational geodesy: it replaced spheroidal trigonometry performed on angular latitude and longitude with vector algebra, and calculus based methods used to achieve ellipsoid level precision with iterative computer algorithms. Fast planetary, isometric, spatial sorting and searching was made possible by organizing the data using spheroidal Voronoi tessellations. (For additional details, please see this text).

In 2007, exclusive rights to the Hipparchus Libraries were sold to Microsoft Corporation, and Geodyssey Limited has been voluntarily dissolved in 2017.

Geodyssey's website is maintained for reference purposes only by its former principals. Through it, 64-bit version executables of two Hipparchus demo suites, Galileo and Georama, are still available for free download.

•••