GPlates is free and open source desktop software for the interactive
visualisation of plate tectonics for research, educational,
professional, and other purposes. It is developed by an international
team of researchers and software developers who refer to internal
divisions of the University of Sidney and Caltech (California
Institute of Technology).

GPlates offers a novel combination of interactive plate tectonic
reconstructions, geographic information system (GIS) functionality and
raster data visualisation. GPlates enables both the visualisation and
the manipulation of plate tectonic reconstructions and associated data
through geological time.
GPlates can be used to handle and visualise data in a variety of
geometries and formats, including raster data, to link plate kinematics
to geodynamic models, to serve as an interactive client in a
grid-computing network, to facilitate the production of high-quality
paleo-geographic maps.

GPlates requires in runtime pre-packed datasets provided by the project
or other datasets. By default, this slackbuild does not install any 
dataset, since the download of project's data source is allowed only by
using a web browser. Standard procedure compliant with curl or wget is
not allowed.

If you want to install the data source using this slackbuild follow the
download instructions reported in README.SBo file and save the archive
gplates_2.3.0_geodata.zip in the same directory of the slackbuild
script. The slackbuild autodetect this archive and if found will
include the datasets in the installation package. Datasets will be
installed in the directory /usr/share/gplates/GeoData

Alternative datasets are not handled by this slackbuild. If you want
to use other datasets you have to add them in local or shared
directories and apply them using the tools of the application GUI.

CGAL library is a required dependency, but the build can also use the
alternative header-only library CGAL5 if installed in your system.

Published works powered with GPlates should include the following
citation:

Müller, R. D., Cannon, J., Qin, X., Watson, R. J., Gurnis, M., 
Williams, S., et al. 2018. GPlates: Building a virtual Earth through
deep time. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 19. 
doi:10.1029/2018GC007584.