Hello, My name is Brylie Oxley. I am a student at Sierra College in Nevada City, CA. I would like to apply for the GSoC program.
I have been studying GIS at Sierra College, where the courses focus on proprietary tools. For libre GIS tools to be viable options, we need high quality cartographic tools. This is where I see Inkscape as an EXCELLENT candidate. With some effort and extension, Inkscape can be used as an integrated cartographic tool in a libre GIS workflow.
The primary goal of the extension would be to enable Inkscape to receive/display information from one or more Libre Geospatial tools/data sources (such as QGIS, PostGIS, GeoServer, MapServer, OpenStreetMap, OpenLayers, and/or GRASS GIS.) Python would seem to be a good candidate language as there are already Python bindings in Inkscape, QGIS, and GRASS. The primary task of the extension would be to send/receive geodata, so most of the heavy lifting might be able to be done by existing modules (specifically GDAL/OGR.) http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_and_Python#Writing_Python_scripts_in_GRASS http://www.qgis.org/pyqgis-cookbook/ http://pypi.python.org/pypi/GDAL
I feel that this is a very important step for the viability of libre geospatial and would appreciate any mentorship and feedback that this community can offer. Thank you very much for your time and consideration. --Brylie Oxley