[mapguide-users] QGIS to MapGuide

[Jackie Ng]

There's several problems right now that make this a very hard problem to
solve.

 1. Addressing the QGIS <-> MapGuide impedance mismatch in data connections
 2. Addressing the QGIS <-> MapGuide impedance mismatch in layer styling

The first one is the easiest of the two, but it is still a difficult
problem. QGIS uses OGR for it's data connections. Our theoretical publishing
plugin could try to publish these connections to MapGuide as Feature Sources
using the OGR provider, which is more than feasible (given how much more
fully featured the OGR provider is for MGOS 3.0), but what if your QGIS
layers have lots of expressions? They're not going to immediately translate
to FDO expressions.

The second one is the really hard one. QGIS and MapGuide have fundamentally
different styling engines, how do you reconcile between the two systems? Is
there a minimum amount of visual fidelity that we should try to preserve so
that whatever gets published to MapGuide will look 70-90% similar to what we
see in QGIS? I now know why some people want MapGuide to support SLD,
because if MapGuide supported it, that would be our "bridge" to publish from
QGIS (or any other GIS that supports SLD) to MapGuide while preserving
visual fidelity of the spatial data.

As a semi-frequent QGIS user, I'd love to see better integration between the
two. I've mentioned in one of my end-of-year blog posts that MapGuide's core
focus nowadays should be to better interoperate with other GIS/mapping
software and libraries. QGIS is a big player, and we should definitely look
at integration possibilities between the two.

But right now, QGIS and MapGuide are like oil and water. There is not many
areas where we can easily build a bridge between the two without having to
overcome some major technological obstacles.

- Jackie



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