FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I ran across this Slashdot article and immediately thought of Minetest. It seems to me that a Lua script could be written to do something like this (take some sort of data and create a minetest world from it). Would it have to be done with LVM? Could it be done at all?

I was thinking about this too.

You could write a mod to fetch height map data, and then do it on map generation call back.