[GRASS-dev] Proposal: OSGeo Cartographic Library

[benjamin.ducke at ufg.uni-kiel.de]

Dear all,

I am not sure in how far this directly relates to the OSGeo Cartographic
Library, but I have a feeling it does somehow:

At my company, we are currently trying to phase out all closed source
GIS tools that could potentially create vendor lock-ins and thus
result in unpredictable financial risks and loss of flexibility.

With the in-house workflow soon to be based on open standards and
protocols plus XML files for complex GIS projects, we still face
the problem of ESRI map documents (MXD format) project files.
Sometimes clients want to get MXD project files along with the
geodata and sometimes legal requirements force us to renew project
application with maps based on the same MXD layouts as previous
hand-ins.

Unfortunately, MXD is a closed, binary format and ESRI have removed
support for export/import of old ASCII ArcView project files from
ArcMap, managing to create a sweet lock-in trap.

I could not find a file format specification for MXD and neither
any open source project that tries to reverse-engineer it.

So my question is:

How feasible do you think it would be to create open standards for

a) GIS projects (layer names, data sources, grouping)
b) layer style files (opacity, categories, colour schemes)
c) feature labels (fonts, halos, label coords, rotation and size)

?

Once such standards have been established and widely adopted,
ESRI and others might be forced to implement them in their
products, much like WMS, WFS and PostGIS support.

Cheers,

Benjamin

Glynn Clements wrote:
> Markus Neteler wrote:
>
>> (just submitted to OSGeo-Discuss)
>>
>> I would like to launch the idea of an "OSGeo Cartographic Library" to
>> share concepts, source code and regression tests:
>>
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Cartographic_Library
>>
>> GRASS, QGIS and others are in the need of own map printing tools
>> for high quality output but these projects should not start from scratch.
>> There is a wealth of underlying code already in Mapserver, Mapguide etc
>> which could be re-used in the terms of their respective licenses and
>> certainly of programming language compatibility.
>>
>> Please hack the wiki page and post your ideas.