[OSM-dev] [ GSOC ] Mapnik Stylesheet editor

[Raghu Ram]

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>
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