Blueprint for GIS Import/Export

We need to be able to Import & Export these XML formats to/from the Database:

• GeoRSS (URL fetch/publish)
• GPX (File upload/download)
• KML (File upload/download & URL fetch/publish)
• OSM (File upload/download)
• GML (? Low priority, not used much in real world)

Other formats which may be useful are Shapefiles, PostGIS & JSON.

These should be representations added to the RESTlike controller.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, we could consider wrapping ​FeatureServer to do a lot of this work for us (like Web2Py uses CherryPy) since it is WSGI-based.
Alternatively we could look to borrow code from it.

The XML conversion is probably best-done using an XSD parser:

• ​GeoRSS
  • ​http://georss.org/xml/1.1/georss.xsd
  • ​http://georss.org/xml/1.1/gmlgeorss.xsd
• GPX
  • ​http://www.topografix.com/gpx/1/1/gpx.xsd
• GML
  • ​http://schemas.opengis.net/gml/3.2.1/
• KML
  • ​http://schemas.opengis.net/kml/2.2.0/ogckml22.xsd
• OSM
  • ​http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~kleptog/osm-0.5.dtd

Many options available for XML Import/Export, e.g.:

• PyRXP: ​http://www.reportlab.org/pyrxp.html
  • Faster & optionally validating (DTD, XSD?), but requires compiling into Python so less portable (unless using pyexpat wrapper)
  • PyRXP_Documentation.pdf
  • XSD->DTD conversion (our schema are in XSD format)
    • ​http://crism.maden.org/consulting/pub/xsl/xsd2dtd.xsl
    • ​http://weblogs.asp.net/rchartier/archive/2006/03/21/440782.aspx
    • ​http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200504/msg00757.html
    • ​http://bytes.com/groups/xml/85935-converting-xsd-into-dtd
• cElementTree - included in Python 2.5, strict & fast: ​http://effbot.org/zone/celementtree.htm
• sgmlop (supported by xmlrpclib): ​http://effbot.org/zone/sgmlop-index.htm
• pyexpat (non-validating & slower, but built-in to Python 2)
  • ​http://docs.python.org/library/pyexpat.html

This is another option for Import (via Python structures):

• ​http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/generateDS.html

XML links:

• ​http://www.w3schools.com/Schema/schema_intro.asp
• ​http://diveintopython.org/xml_processing/index.html
• ​http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/09/18/py.html
• ​http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/09/10/py.html

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GIS BluePrints