Hi there! Some time ago I told you that I'm developing a label placement optimizer for SVG maps created with Osmarender (OSMLabelOptimizer, see [1]). What I noticed while coding the tool was that Osmarender removes some information from the original osm data when converting to SVG. For example it is not trivial to find the label attached to a point or area feature. Nevertheless it is possible, but I had do do some ugly things (e.g. comparing coordinates and css styles, etc.). What I therefore need is semantic information attached to SVG map (why only using the SVG metadata tag for copyright information?).
Finally, as described on [2], I came to OWL [6]. So far I created an OWL ontology which can be used to describe an SVG map [3] and a patch [4] to give Osmarender the ability to create an OWL description using my ontology. The description contains information about the features contained in the map, with links to the linkedgeodata project [5] (provides an RDF description for all OSM data). Each feature is also connected to it's labels and the SVG elements which draw them. If you still ask yourself what this is all about, here are some more ideas why a semantic description of SVG maps could make sense: * If you create your SVG map with Osmarender and send it to someone else he not only gets a picture, but he gets the whole information available from OSM connected to the map. Perhaps in the future there will be a java application where he can load the SVG map and get a list of all features shown on the map or there will be an application which uses the metadata to calculate and show a route from one point on the map to another point. Or perhaps the user is just interested in the opening hours of a museum shown on the map. * Semantic search engines could index these SVG maps and users could run complex queries to find maps. * A Osmarender SVG map editor that makes it easy to add something like an highlighted route or a circle focusing on a special point feature. For this editor it would also be possible to give the user the ability to enrich the map with labels giving addtional information that is so far not shown on default SVG maps (e.g. speed signs, opening hours, etc.) * Especially postprocessing of SVG maps will be much more easier, because we now have all the information we need. What do you think about this approach? If you are interested, please visit my page [2], test the patch [4] and give feedback to me. Best regards, Sebastian [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Esscue/Labelling [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Esscue/OsmarenderOWL [3] http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/OSMLabelOptimizer/misc/svgmap.owl [4] http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/OSMLabelOptimizer/misc/owl_osmarender_patch_r13973.patch [5] http://linkedgeodata.org [6] http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/ _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
