OGC Cartographic Text

Two years ago several members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) including MapInfo, Autodesk, Intergraph, and Laser-scan began an interoperability initiative that was designed to make it possible for a standards-compliant application to display a map from any standards-compliant datastore.  The initial   objectives were standards for oriented points and cartographic text.  Cartographic text turned out to be a bit contentious because it conflicted with a traditional perspective that stylization information did not belong in the database with geospatial data. 

I am happy to report that the Open Geospatial Consortium OGC membership is revising the simple features (SF) specification and a key discussion item is how to best handle cartographic text.  This will have important implications for RDBMS vendors like Oracle that support spatial data as well as for geospatial vendors that consume spatial data.  I am optimistic that we will see the OGC discussion result in a modified SF that will include cartographic text and that we will see support for the revised SF specification in future product releases from Oracle, MapInfo, Autodesk, Intergraph, Laser-scan, Bentley, and others.

Comments

[Jason Birch]

Geoff,

In one of my presentations at GeoTec, I argued that it is more cost effective to implement scheduled translations than a central spatial database in many cases. One of the primary reasons I gave for this (other than administration and licensing costs) was the difficulty in standardising text labels and symbology between the various systems.

Database purists might argue that storing information about text placement is contaminating the data, but really it is metadata: information on how the data maintainer recommends the text be represented.

I look forward to this standard being adopted by the various vendors. At the same time, it would be nice if there was agreement on a portable feature representation descriptor. Having to maintain separate libraries of symbols (ttf, autocad blocks, wmf) and scrambling to match linear representations between different systems accecssing the same data is a huge productivity drain. Something like SLD for SF would be useful, maybe using SVG for the symbols?

Jason