Technical Ramblings

OpenLayers has the ability to read and write geographic data in several different formats: KML, GML, GeoRSS (Simple and GML), GeoJSON, WKT. One of the things that hasn’t thus far been exploited as a result of this is the use of OpenLayers as a format conversion tool… until today.

OpenLayers Data Conversion is a new service that allows easy conversion from any of the formats that OpenLayers supports to any of the formats that OpenLayers supports. Simply paste your data, choose your format, and hit convert. Additionally, this tool supports reprojection to and from Spherical Mercator, the internal coordinate system used in Google Maps.

This code isn’t quite in trunk of OpenLayers yet, but in the meantime, you can grab the example from an svn sandbox, including the prebuilt lightweight OpenLayers build for format conversion.

Grabbed Sean Gillies yesterday and talked to him about GeoJSON. We came to a conclusion that his argument against type, although not ill-reasoned, was simply going to require a couple extra edits to the spec that might possibly limit its use slightly more. So, we decided to skip duck typing, use the type attribute everywhere, etc. I don’t know if Sean was really *convinced*, but he was willing to let me put his name back on the spec 🙂

Another GeoJSON community member (Martin Daly) pointed out that abusing EPSG (By saying “Use EPSG, but ignore the coordinate order”) is probably the wrong way to go about things. After talking to Raj, I got some feedback, and posted about an alternative (using OGC URNs) to the list.

So, if you have comments on GeoJSON, please share them now.