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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>A few days ago this came across the wire from Simone:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>“</span></font>About GML, I am pretty sure that
everybody that's been working with the 3.x series can say that it is an ugly
beast, big, complex, unfriendly, hence I am not surprised that KML took over it
due to the fact that's pretty easy to use and implement especially for simple
needs.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>I have no doubt that the complexity of GML 3 killed a
lot of the momentum behind what I thought GML 2 took a good stab at: A simple text
based file format for the transfer of simple spatial features.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>On the OpenJUMP developers mailing list we’ve
been discussing the overall problem of sharing this type of data between open
source GIS projects, at least in the open source Java GIS community. It seems
we are all using ESRI Shapefiles for data transfer and storage, and this
presents some technical limitations. We’ve only recently started to talk
about working on an alternative to Shapefiles and GML. Our two ideas so far
are:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>[1] A CSV file in which the first row contains feature
attribute names, the second row identifies feature attribute data types using
standard XML data types and WKT for geometry attributes, and in which the other
rows contain the actual attribute values, one feature per row.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>[2] A restricted form of GML 2 that will eliminate the
need for an external schema and simplify parsing. Think of this as “GML 2
Resurrected”.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>This is still very much in the discussion stages, but
I thought it might be of interest to some on this mailing list. If there would
be others interested in reviewing and or contributing to the specification of such
a file format, or for the Java code to support reading and writing it, please
let me know.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-autospace:none'><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Landon (A.K.A. – The Sunburned Surveyor)<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Arial Narrow"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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