Re: SVG and GIS

[James Macgill]

At 07:39 PM 3/2/01 -0800, you wrote:
> Does anyone know of other companies using SVG for GIS?  Is use of SVG
> a familiar idea or common practice in the GIS community?

To the best of my knowledge it is a familiar idea but not yet common 
practice.  If the standards of the OpenGIS group are followed and 
implemented (and judging by their increasing membership this seems likely) 
then SVG may well form part of a number of GIS solutions.

The OpenGIS consortium (OGC) should soon be releasing version 2 of their 
own XML specification of geographic features, Geographic Markup Language 
(GML2).  Most architectures under discussion see GML being used to store 
vector features together with projection and other geographic specific 
information.  Servers would then transform the GML into SVG with 
information regarding shading and styles being applied before sending the 
SVG file to the clients machine.

My own preference is actually to stick with GML all the way though as this 
provides the client with the full geographic information allowing for 
better interaction at the client end.  To do this requires a GML aware 
client such as a small java applet.

As an example I put together a quick concept demo from an early draft of 
the first GML specification.
http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/geotools/demos/gml/

As for moving features around, the following pulls coordinates from a 
server, but they could be coming from code in the applet itself. (or some 
javascript for that matter)

http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/geotools/demos/gps/

Both demos are powered by the open source java toolkit GeoTools

http://geotools.sourceforge.net

James


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