[Qgis-developer] icons and styles / deciding which new icons are needed

[mayeul.kauffmann at free.fr]

Hi,
I have a question (and I suggest a draft answer) related to icon sets for large datasets: how do you decide what are the most needed icons? For instance with OSM data, it is not possible to read with human eyes the whole world map at the scale 1:5000 nor to read all the wiki pages (and some tags do not have wiki page yet), then decide what is urgently missing.
 
When facing this question a few months ago, I created an R script [R is one of the most advanced GNU/GPL statistical software]. The R script computes some basic statistics on features missing a symbology. You give it:
- a qml QGIS style (rule-based renderer)
- a link to some OSM data
It gives you: the most frequent features without symbology, telling you by how much your coverage will be improved if you render those features. It is more advanced than websites with OSM statistics that are tag based, since here it's rule based (and a rule can use many tags).
Is anyone interested in having this R script? (Without R installed and a *very* basic knowledge of R, this is useless of course).
Mayeul


----- Mail Original -----
De: "Alex Mandel" <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>
À: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
Envoyé: Mardi 22 Février 2011 10h00:30 GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Berne / Rome / Stockholm / Vienne
Objet: Re: [Qgis-developer] icons and styles

On 02/22/2011 12:50 AM, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> Hi all.
> I think we should provide an opportunity for uploading sets of icons and
> styles, on the same infrastructure that we are going to use for plugins.
> I'd appreciate comments on this.
> All the best.

It's already on the to do list for the django web app. I'm working with
the OSGeo Graphics mailing list to try and coordinate efforts on this
since they've been thinking about the idea and have an svn folder for it.

In particular I've already started on some tools to automate keeping
collections of icons in single svg files and using inkscape to split
them into individual files for application use, while preserving
metadata about the icons in the svg files themselves. My plan at this
point is to then use a Django app to catalog the keywords tags from a
specific field in the svg xml into a searchable database and then
replicate this functionality locally as a plugin (possibly future core
item in symbology). Note, as far as I know this will only work for point
symbology right now, I do not have a plan for lines or polygon fills yet
but that's because they aren't svg based at this time.

The whole thing is still in the very early stages so I welcome
conversation on the topic and invite others to join OSGeo graphics to
really find a multi-app solution for the FOSS GIS community. It will
probably be a few months before we get anything up on the website, since
there are much higher priorities for the plugin site that still need to
be done.

Thanks,
Alex
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