April 01, 2010
Geo Style Sheets
Cartagen, the institute that describes itself as “a framework for dynamic mapping”, has presented a new way of styling of geographical maps. GSS strongly reminds of famous CSS, the style sheets that are used to design the look and feel of webpages. Investigating a GSS file of a map of Rome, it even looks more or less the same.
“Just like CSS for styling web pages, GSS is a specification for designing maps. Adapted for dynamic data sources, GSS can define changing geographic elements, display multiple datasets, and even respond to contextual tags like ‘condition:poor’. (…) Instead of sending pre-rendered tiles for every zoom level, Cartagen draws maps dynamically on the client side. This means maps can move, adapt, and redraw, and can include as many layers of data as needed.”
Interesting to mention is that GSS follows the open up of maps and geographical data, and goes even further by placing an open source style layer upon it. It could be a useful tool for people to easily design maps, even without specific cartographic knowledge.