Dear all, I am not sure in how far this directly relates to the OSGeo Cartographic Library, but I have a feeling it does somehow:
At my company, we are currently trying to phase out all closed source GIS tools that could potentially create vendor lock-ins and thus result in unpredictable financial risks and loss of flexibility. With the in-house workflow soon to be based on open standards and protocols plus XML files for complex GIS projects, we still face the problem of ESRI map documents (MXD format) project files. Sometimes clients want to get MXD project files along with the geodata and sometimes legal requirements force us to renew project application with maps based on the same MXD layouts as previous hand-ins. Unfortunately, MXD is a closed, binary format and ESRI have removed support for export/import of old ASCII ArcView project files from ArcMap, managing to create a sweet lock-in trap. I could not find a file format specification for MXD and neither any open source project that tries to reverse-engineer it. So my question is: How feasible do you think it would be to create open standards for a) GIS projects (layer names, data sources, grouping) b) layer style files (opacity, categories, colour schemes) c) feature labels (fonts, halos, label coords, rotation and size) ? Once such standards have been established and widely adopted, ESRI and others might be forced to implement them in their products, much like WMS, WFS and PostGIS support. Cheers, Benjamin Glynn Clements wrote: > Markus Neteler wrote: > >> (just submitted to OSGeo-Discuss) >> >> I would like to launch the idea of an "OSGeo Cartographic Library" to >> share concepts, source code and regression tests: >> >> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Cartographic_Library >> >> GRASS, QGIS and others are in the need of own map printing tools >> for high quality output but these projects should not start from scratch. >> There is a wealth of underlying code already in Mapserver, Mapguide etc >> which could be re-used in the terms of their respective licenses and >> certainly of programming language compatibility. >> >> Please hack the wiki page and post your ideas. _______________________________________________ grass-dev mailing list grass-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev