[Carto] Introduction and thoughts (too)

[Laurent Jégou]

Hello, i'm mostly silent on the lists, although attentive, but the subject
here is very interesting to me.

First, an introduction. I'm a production cartographer engineer for the
geography dept. of the Toulouse-2 university (southwest of France, pardon my
english), and a teacher of cartography (methods, history, webmapping, mainly
for master students). I'm using and teaching several GIS tools, proprietary
and open-source, and i'm engaged in various webmapping projects. My PhD
thesis project is about "graphic semiology" and map presentation
(perception/cognition and map graphical properties).

My master students are already doing their internships, so i'm not directly
interested about the internship offer (not this year), but we can
participate in other ways (testing, reviewing, for example).

I'm coding with Java (my main project is a thematic mapping software, SCALP
: http://w3.geoprdc.univ-tlse2.fr/scap/java/index_en.html), with other
projects mostly web-based (the postgis->mapserver->openlayers chain). I
contributed, some time ago, to OpenJump with a proportional symbols plugin.
(I'm often accused of being obsessed with objectivity and accuracy of the
graphic representation...).

To return to the topic, i think that such a focus to the quality of the
graphical output is often a sign of maturity and has a big impact
(underestimed) to the public of software users and maps end-users. For
example when AGG was added to MapServer, i clearly saw the "wow effect" :-)
So standardizing the rendering engine and output is important.

I think the comparison with the subject of Symbology Encoding could be
useful. It's an OpenGIS Implementation specification
(http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/symbol), and it's coming to
GeoServer (by way of SLD), Mapnik, Cartagen, etc.

I'll be glad to follow the exchanges on the list, and participate if i can.

Laurent

-- 
Laurent Jégou
Cartographe et enseignant
UTM - Dépt. Géographie
31058 TOULOUSE Cedex 9 - 05.61.50.43.89
http://www.univ-tlse2.fr/geoprdc
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