Andreas Neumann

Building SVG-based Web GUIs for interactive cartographic applications

Andreas Neumann

ETH Zurich, Institute of Cartography

Abstract

Cartographers are among the early adopters of SVG, since SVG's rich features regarding graphics design and interactivity is promising for delivering high quality and highly interactive cartographic web applications. The open and extensible nature of the graphics standard allows SVG applications to be tied into any serverside framework map authors are familiar with. Its XML and text base allows easy generation of data driven graphics from XML and database sources, which is an important prerequisite for the automatic generation of maps and info graphics.

The presentation shows some results of a couple years of teaching and research in the fields of SVG and webmapping. Examples include database-driven topographic maps, a distributed geodata acquisition tool, an application for browsing through geo-referenced images, an interactive map of European cultural heritage and a couple of E-Learning examples.

As part of the development of SVG applications, GUI objects where created as needed. As a result, a number of SVG GUI objects are now freely available for general use in other SVG applications. Widgets include selection lists, comboboxes, windows, tabgroups, buttons, checkboxes and radiobuttons, sliders, colourpickers and a textbox. Some advantages of using SVG for user interfaces are the scalability, the high degrees of freedom regarding graphics design, stylability, the possibility of transformations, and more. Although the GUI widgets don't yet follow a clean MVC design, they are completely stylable and relatively easy to use in other SVG applications. The widgets are documented and small examples demonstrate the usage of the widgets.