G2ST: A novel method to transform GML to SVG

Geography Markup Language (GML) has been adopted as de facto standard for geo-referenced information storing and exchanging, while Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), also a W3C-recommended XML standard, is appearing as an ideal format for rendering maps. Usually, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is used to transform GML documents to SVG documents. Considering the complexity and variety of GML documents, however, designing XSLT rules is not a easy task; even worse, such a method cannot guarantee that the generated SVG document is valid. In this paper, we present a novel method to transform GML documents to SVG documents, while guaranteeing that the result SVG documents conform to a certain DTD or Schema pre-specified by the users. With this new method, it is convenient for the users to construct transformation rules from GML to SVG guided by the pre-specified SVG DTD or schema. We propose three algorithms to implement the new method. We also build a prototype and conduct preliminary experiments, which validate the effectiveness of the new method.