A visual editor for OGC SLD files for automating the configuration of WMS and mobile map applications

Abstract

AbstractThe OGC Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) specification [OGC 2003] allows describing the design and contents of a map — in particular a map served by a SLD-WMS — in a formal way through the use of a strict XML schema. The specification is getting more and more used and supported by several implementations of Web Map Servers. But SLD still has some weaknesses — especially for use in LBS, see e.g. [Brinkhoff 2004]. We present here the first implementation of a mobile map application (mobile city guide running on a PDA), that uses the SLD specification as configuration of the mobile map. On the other hand in LBS or UbiGIS maps need to be generated dynamically taking a lot of further factors into account — in particular also attributes describing the current user, the situation and general context [Zipf 2002, Reichenbacher 2004, Meng et al. 2004, Zipf and Jöst 2006]. In order to use this kind of parameter and information in an automated map service on the internet or on mobile devices we need also formal representations for this type of information — e.g. also as XML files. Then we need to combine the information from this context models and the base map which is represented through a SLD file to automatically generate adapted maps according to those parameters. The result is again an SLD file describing the adapted map, which then can be used within a request to an SLD-enabled WMS or a mobile application that supports SLD. So the first task is to generate the SLD for the base map. In order to automate the task of designing maps for Web Map Servers or mobile map applications we introduce a free software tool called ArcMap2SLD-Generator (http://arcmap2sld.geoinform.fhmainz.de/). This tool is helpful as it allows generating a valid SLD-file from the design of a map within ESRI ArcMap. The resulting SLD in turn can act as a base for further modifications through user or context models in order to generate user-adapted map representations as SLD [Zipf 2005] in a standard-conformant way.KeywordsMobile DeviceContext ModelConfiguration FileArea FillingVisual EditorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.