Very interesting project: http://fdo.osgeo.org/. It is a library like GDAL but a bit higher level, also available in C++ / .NET version (swig). Probably will be nice to rely on it while implementing support for rasters in Habitat / SOBEK-2D.
And it seems to be a very robust one if list of products using it contains such programs like AutoCAD Map and FME.
FDO Data Access Technology is an API for manipulating, defining and analyzing geospatial information regardless of where it is stored.
FDO website also contains a link to another interesting program called MapGuide, prbably will be of interest if we will move to web-based front-end.
