[QGIS-Developer] Support to loading GIS projects from an extended OWC geopackage in the QGIS core

[doublebyte]

Hi,

Just to elaborate a bit more some ideas about the geopackage as a format to
support to ancillary storage:

- From the mere technical point of view, geopackage is very convenient for
storing QGIS projects. This is because we can actually store *everything*
within the geopackage: project information, data, metadata, style and other
data such as the information about labelling.

- However, in my opinion, the added value of the OWC geopackage extension,
which differentiates it from a common sqlite or spatialite db, is the fact
that it relies on* OGC standards*. This is what enables us to port
information to other GIS software which is no necessarily QGIS-aware. 

- Our proposal for the OWC geopackage extension is to keep it
standards-based, which means that we could support use cases such as the
ancilliary storage, if we would use mechanisms such as the tjs standard.
Although the support to queries in the OWC context which Paul mentioned is
still at the level of discussion, standards do evolve and I think that we
(as QGIS community) could also get involved in this evolution, whenever we
are pushing for generic and abstract mechanisms which could be reused by the
whole geopackage community. So to wrap it up, the answer is "yes", we could
support the ancillary storage, but we need to find out exactly how.

- Another interesting feature which arises from this discussion, is the
ability to support QGIS geopackage extensions in the core. Right now, the
core reader is aware of the "standard" geopackage format (through OGR) and
of the "qgis extension". If we implement it, it would also be aware of the
"owc extension". But what if we could create a more abstract reader, which
would look for extension tables and relate them to a certain "type" of
plugin? This would allow people to implement reading support to different
"flavours" of geopackages without much effort. I did not made a risk
anaysis, so I am not sure if there are security (or other) issues associated
to this, but I would love to hear your thoughts about this topic.

                                                    Joana



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