Hi all, I am RaghuRam, a 4th year student in the department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur. I have been working since an year on Mobile GIS and Map rendering stuff as a part of my BTech project. I am really awed at the amount of work being done voluntarily in the OSM community. Especially, maps generated using Mapnik from OSM data are very beautiful. I have been trying to come up with my own slippy map for the Navteq LBS challenge using mapnik. There are some issues that I faced in doing so and would like to address them during my proposal. Sorry, but to be frank, Mapnik Stylesheets are too complex to write and edit. Coming up with a new mapnik style sheet for some data is difficult and time consuming, not to say, nearly impossible for a beginner who has little idea of GIS and stuff. Though there is a program called "viewer" in the mapnik svn that helps in viewing Mapnik Style sheets, its very naive. It lacks the main functionality of working like an editor.
What I propose is a WYSIWYG <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG> editor for Mapnik stylesheets. Users can create , load and save stylesheets. Once a stylesheet is loaded one can add layers to it. Users can choose from one of the supported Data backends like shapefile, postgis etc.. and provide the necessary information like server address,user name,password.. to finish off the layer creation. Once a layer is created one should associate a style with it. The application should be intelligent here to make it easy for the user. It should connect to the corresponding datasource and retreive the features. Now the user creates a style corresponding to the layer. Style creation would be driven based on the features of the datasource. Users can add filters and select properties of the point,line and polygon symbolizers. Here is the link<http://raghuram.nadiminti.googlepages.com/prototype.tar.gz>to the simple ui form designed in QT, resembling mostly the viewer in the mapnik svn. <http://raghuram.nadiminti.googlepages.com/prototype.tar.gz> Waiting for your comments... <http://raghuram.nadiminti.googlepages.com/prototype.tar.gz>
_______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev
