For years, the cartographic styling of geodata on the web has been a recurring theme in the world of geoinformatics. Various standards exist, including official standards such as OGC Styled Layer Descriptor with OGC Filter Encoding, as well as industry standards such as Mapbox Styles and project-related styling guidelines, for example, in QGIS or OpenLayers.
However, there is a lack of interactive web-based software to enable users to easily handle the cartographic design of their geodata. Although there are isolated solutions for individual standards mentioned above, a comprehensive web interface to convert styling guidelines into various formats, among other things, has been lacking until now.
This universal web interface has been under development for several weeks. Under the project name “GeoStyler”, a web-based tool for the interactive creation of cartographic style regulations for geodata is currently being developed.
https://terrestris.github.io/geostyler/
GeoStyler consists of five main components:
- GeoStyler:
React-based component library that enables the development of a customized GUI for editing and parsing cartographic styles. The documentation for currently existing components can be found here. - Geostyler-Style:
Definition of the style used internally in GeoStyler. The use of a central style makes it possible to parse from any external style to any other external style. The only prerequisite for this is the implementation of a corresponding style parser (see point 4). - Geostyler-Data:
Definition of the data structure used internally in GeoStyler. - Style Parser:
Implementations for parsing existing style guidelines from/to Geostyler-Style.
Examples: geostyler-sld-parser and geostyler-openlayers-parser - Data Parser:
Implementations for parsing to supported geodata formats.
The following formats can currently be used:
Style guidelines
– OGC SLD
– OpenLayers Styles
Geodata formats
– GeoJSON
– OGC WFS
GeoStyler is implemented as an open source project, and the open architecture makes it very easy to integrate additional formats (both for style guidelines and for geodata) into GeoStyler by implementing corresponding parsers.
The GeoStyler project was initiated by terrestris, and the initial architectural concept and implementation were realized in cooperation with the Geoinformatikbüro meggsimum.
We will continue to work on the GeoStyler project in the future. Generally, the aim is to extend the Geostyler with functionalities that SLD already provides (such as multiple symbolizers in a rule, extended formatting of lines such as lineCap, lineJoin, lineDashOffset). In the future, internationalization (support of language packs) should also be enabled (link to pull request: https://github.com/terrestris/geostyler/pull/294)
All interested parties are cordially invited to participate in the project. Any kind of contribution is welcome:
– Testing the application
– Error reports and feature requests
– Expansion of the documentation
– Code contributions / implementations
Source code on github: https://github.com/terrestris/geostyler
Online documentation: https://terrestris.github.io/geostyler/styleguide/
