TITLE:
Transforming GML to Presentation Languages by Extending XSLT
AUTHORS:
Sajjad Hassany Pazoky, Farshad Hakimpour
KEYWORDS:
Technology; Preference for Quality; Volume of Trade; Vertical Intra-Industry Trade
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.6 No.1,
February
13,
2014
ABSTRACT: Diversity of practices and methods in all fields
is the basis of emerging standards in different areas. World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) has standardized eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a very convenient tool to structure
data for numerous purposes. OGC standardized Geography Markup Language (GML), which is an XML-based
language, to store and transport geospatial data. Despite the fact that it is a
medium to separate georeferenced data from presentation, GML by itself is not intended
to visualize geo-referenced data. One of the solutions to visualize GML is to use
eXtensible Style sheet Language Transformation (XSLT) as transformer to a visualization
language such as Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG). Unlike the usual procedure, the major
advantage of the proposed approach is that the transformation process is shifted to
the client-side. XSLT as a median language is a general-purpose transformation tool.
As it is not specialized for map cartography, map making process is very complicated
using this primitive language. To facilitate transformation process, in this research,
XSLT is extended to meet cartography requirements. Furthermore, a graphical user
interface (XCartoT) is designed to set all the map properties interactively. XCartoT
provides a user-friendly interface for cartographers to automatically generate
necessary XSL files for their intended maps. The goal of this research is to develop
a major step towards the geospatial Web.