[OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal: OSGeo Cartographic Library

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 06:53:19PM +0300, Ari Jolma wrote:
> Frank Warmerdam kirjoitti:
> >
> >In my opinion we would be better off starting with a widely accepted
> >standard like SLD as a basis of a feature styling standard
> 
> I'm right now looking at SVG. It is a full graphics description 
> language, but maybe the styling information could be somehow picked out 
> an reused for our purposes. SVG is becoming more popular and for example 
> many symbol sets (also mapping symbols) are already in SVG. Thus we'd 
> also need tools for parsing SVG.

SVG *isn't* a rule language: SVG is one possible output of taking a Rule
language (SLD), combining it with geography and attributes (GML,
Shapefile, what have you), and creating a final product.

Other products could include raster images  (PNG, JPG), Other vector
formats (VML, Canvas in the browser, PDF, PS, .ai), or encodings into
things like KML.

> If the stylings that are distributed with geodatasets are SVG, then 
> producing SVG maps would be easier, wouldn't it?

I'm not sure this really makes sense. 

SVG is a style language. SLD is a Rule language. SLD is the source: SVG
is the destination (one of many).

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer