GENERALIZING XML-ENCODED SPATIAL DATA ON THE WEB
Lassi Lehto, Tiina Kilpeläinen · 2001
The paper presents research and development work concentrating on real-time generalization processes of spatial data for visualization on the Web environment and small devices. The generalisation approach applicable in network-based spatial data services needs to be drastically different compared with the traditional cartographic generalisation. In this paper the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) techniques in data transformations is presented. The main interest in the research lays in the XSLT process as a means to generalise XML-encoded spatial data in real time. The prototype system developed at the Finnish Geodetic Institute (FGI) applies Geography Markup Language (GML) in spatial data encoding and the data access interface is conformant with the Open GIS Consortium’s (OGC) Simple Features specification. The implemented generalization operators include selection, building simplification and aggregation operators, which are run in real-time, during the request-response dialogue in the network.