Alright, Here are some other thoughts.
First off what about a open office (open base) type approach... This mimmics the ESRI MSAccess approach and seams to work well for non server environments. Also open office is a good environment for some basic applications. Next, what ever happened to the adoption of GML... Was GML not supposed to be the NEXT interchange fomrat? Perhaps this is a good discussion to include the GML gurus in. The whole discussion of going with a binary GML format makes sense and GML is already used for many web mapping (feature) services. It sounds like a duplication of GML to me... Unless someone can offer a direct compare and contrast between the concept here and the GML/Binary GML concept. In either case being able to convert to and from GML would be a necesity for wide adoption IMHO. Another thought is to encourage some of the proprietary formats to open up. What would it take to get ESRI on board to open up the format (open as in free speech). What about other non-open standards? Once it's open then we can bring the SHP format to modern day useage. Surely much of the format could be salvaged. Besides, if you want wide adoption of an open format then why not go for those players who hold greatest market share. Some thoughts. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of P Kishor Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 09:53 To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format So, I am thinking, Shapefile is the de facto data standard for GIS data. That it is open (albeit not Free) along with the deep and wide presence of ESRI's products from the beginning of the epoch, it has been widely adopted. Existence of shapelib, various language bindings, and ready use by products such as MapServer has continued to cement Shapefile as the format to use. All this is in spite of Shapefile's inherent drawbacks, particularly in the area of attribute data management. What if we came up with a new and improved data format -- call it "Open Shapefile" (extension .osh) -- that would be completely Free, single-file based (instead of the multiple .shp, .dbf, .shx, etc.), and based on SQLite, giving the .osh format complete relational data handling capabilities. We would require a new version of Shapelib, improved language bindings, make it the default and preferred format for MapServer, and provide seamless and painless import of regular .shp data into .osh for native rendering. Its adoption would be quick in the open source community. The non-opensource community would either not give a rat's behind for it, but it wouldn't affect them... they would still work with their preferred .shp until they learned better. By having a completely open and Free single-file based, built on SQLite, fully relational dbms capable spatial data format, it would be positioned for continued improvement and development. Is this too crazy? -- Puneet Kishor _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
