[mapguide-dev] Native KML/KMZ?

[Jason Birch]

That's good news Bob.

I have a couple items that I'd like to talk about (surprised?) :)

The current LOD support is somewhat hard to work with.  The minLodPixels
and maxLodPixels are based on the size of the Region "cube" as rendered
in the viewer.  Unfortunately, the server has no indication of what size
the viewport is in pixels.  This makes it impossible to predict the
optimal box size for performance and user experience.  The optimal value
to get 9 tiles on the screen at 1024x768 often gives 16 tiles (or more)
at 1280x1024.  Also, because this is based on pixel values, I'm not sure
if there is any way of mapping the LOD to the scale ranges used in
MapGuide.

Also, KML has some interesting features (such as tesselation and
extrusion) that are not reflected in the current Map and Layer
properties.  These schemas would need to have an area for the
KML-specific options as well as for enabling/disabling KML support.
These would have to be exposed in Studio and Web Studio.

The new KML spec uses an external image server for icons; this
functionality should probably be leveraged for point style support.

Maybe we could hit up Google for some funding on this :)

On a somewhat unrelated topic...  It would be useful if the MapGuide
roadmap could be opened up, with new features being discussed and spec'd
in a more interactive way.  I understand that Autodesk will be
allocating its resources to the features that make the most business
sense for Autodesk, but I think that it will be hard to build an open
source development community without an open planning process.

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Bray [mailto:robert.bray at autodesk.com] 
Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2006 11:50
To: dev at mapguide.osgeo.org
Subject: RE: [mapguide-dev] Native KML/KMZ?

Jason,

We are beginning to look at options for direct KML support. For me one
of the more exciting aspects of KML 2.1 is the level of detail support.
With this addition we hope to output Layers and Maps directly to
KML/KMZ. Stay tuned, we'll post a paper for dev feedback on how we plan
to support this a little later this summer. In the meantime feel free to
post any thoughts or ideas you have on the subject. 

Bob