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Using Geographical Standards in Web Applications

posted by Satri on Monday March 19, @08:35AM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the standards-at-full-speed dept.
Ask Slashgeo Web Mapping Open Geospatial Consortium
Brudert writes "I am developing a web mapping application called Trailtracer that will ultimately serve as a map viewing, editing, and sharing service. I am a huge fan of standards and am interested in any advice or guidance that the Slashgeo community can offer. I plan on using GML and geoRSS but are these the right choices? Are there other standards I should consider?"

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  • Some starting points

    (Score:2)
    by Satri (3) on Monday March 19, @11:41AM (#1323)
    ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )
    It really depends on what you want to do. In my opinion, standards are essential to any application's future. In this case, start with the OGC [opengeospatial.org]. They're the ones that manage most of the standards. Then go to the OSGeo [osgeo.org] if you want to find open source software which will allow you to easily implement these standards. Both are necessary stops in the geospatial domain.

    GML could be nice for interoperability if you share data with others, otherwise, most GDAL/OGR [gdal.org]-supported format will do. As for using GeoRSS [slashgeo.org], join the bandwagon! I believe GeoRSS has a bright future (and it's easy to implement).

    Previous OGC [slashgeo.org] and OSGeo [slashgeo.org] stories. See also the related stories above.

    • Re:Some starting points

      (Score:3, Insightful)
      by Anonymous Voxel on Monday March 19, @03:07PM (#1324)
      What my professors used to say was...

      "The beauty about standards is that the are so many of them to choose from."

      This is especially true when one talks about spatial data of any sort. I would suggest to look more closely to your audience. GML is not yet as widely adopted, especially by non-free software. Are you going to need to operate within their realm? Standards are beautiful, I don't disagree, but a standard that is not widely adopted is not as useful as a non-standardized solution with wide adoption.
      [ Parent ]

    • Re:Some starting points

      (Score:3, Interesting)
      by urbanows (761) on Tuesday March 20, @09:28AM (#1326)
      ( http://urbano.ws/ )
      You may want to check out the GML Viewer which is powered by Community Mapbuilder.

      The GML Viewer can be downloaded from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=35246&package_id=96549&release_id=471138 [sourceforge.net]
      [ Parent ]