[OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal: OSGeo Cartographic Library

[Sampson, David]

> 
> Thanks for the pointer, that's a nice dataset. Opening these 
> 39 layers makes me ask why there's no style information? 
> Pardon my ignorance on digital cartography, but is it because 
> of standards or something else? 
> How do Arc* tools do it?
> 


Think of three separate boxes. One is tabulart data (tables), in the
ESRI world these are youf *.dbf files, another is geomatery (lines,
points, polygons) found in your *.shp files and the final box is the
styling (realy schnzy shirts and ties) equivalent to SLD in the open
source web mapping world but ESRI also has their cartographic
representations layer (or something like that).

Often in digital geomatics we focus on the data and geometry. Usualy
they apear seamlessly the SHP is connected to the DBF. So now we are
talking about adding in the third box in a standards compliant,
interoperable and open source manner (I am assuming)...

Why do you arc tools have styling?. Perhaps someone has created the
styling as is often the "Value add" portion to data resellers like DMTI.
But the styling is based on the data... So it has nothing to do with the
data and relatively nothing to do with the software as GRASS, QGIS,
JUMP, UDIG, MAPSERVER can all save projects with various styling, they
just don't all use the same approach. Some approaches like SLD's (Styled
layer descriptor) or context documents (maybe not full styling) help
with this.

I think these issues are a PART of this proposed library but I don't
think is the focus as styling is covered with SLD and context documents
etc.

Cheers