FOSS4G 2021 - News from GeoStyler
Channel: FOSS4G
Date: 04/11/2021

When it comes to styling of geodata many tools have their own solution: SLD, QGIS-Styles, OpenLayers-Styles, Leaflet, …

But what to do if you need to share the same style across different formats?
GeoStyler brings the solution. With its standalone parsers, nearly any (layer based) style can be converted from one format to another - from SLD to OpenLayers, QGIS, Mapfile, and vice versa.

On top of this, GeoStyler offers a library of React UI elements to easily create styles in your own WebGIS.

When it comes to the styling of geodata, many projects like QGIS and OpenLayers, use their own solution, even though SLD provides a de-jure standard. This poses quite some problems for users when working with multiple tools in their application stack, as styles might not be shareable between different tools, or might not be applicable anymore after replacing the style managing tool in the stack. In web-development, UI libraries for editing styles in general, are scarce, and libraries for editing arbitrary styles in particular, are missing completely. GeoStyler tries to fill that gap.

GeoStyler is an OSGeo Community Project that provides a set of parser libraries that allow the conversion between different styling formats. The GeoStyler commandline interface provides a tool for server-side style conversion for an arbitrary number of style files - completely automated. With these tools, it is possible to convert a huge amount of QGIS styles to SLD, or Mapfile or any other supported file based styling format and vice versa.

On top of that, GeoStyler provides a UI library for creating and editing such styles in a WYSIWYG editor, which can be integrated into any existing WebGIS. Through its plugin concept, the UI works with any of the supported parsers
and can thereby be used for projects that use SLD, OpenLayers, QML, etc.

Currently, GeoStyler supports following styling formats:

OGC SLD
OpenLayers Styles
Mapfiles
QML
and following geodata formats:

GeoJSON
OGC WFS
Shapefile
With this talk, we want to present the current project status and show how GeoStyler evolved since the last talk. We hope to attract the project to other users and developers.

Authors and Affiliations –
Suleiman, Jan (1)
Koch, Daniel (1)
Volland, Kai (1)
Mayer, Christian (2)

(1) terrestris GmbH & Co. KG, Germany
(2) meggsimum, Germany

Track –
Community / OSGeo

Topic –
Software status / state of the art

Level –
1 - Principiants. No required specific knowledge is needed.

Language of the Presentation –
English