EXTENDING OGC STYLED LAYER DESCRIPTOR (SLD) FOR THEMATIC CARTOGRAPHY Towards the ubiquitous use of advanced mapping functions through standardized visualization rules

Currently we are moving from desktop applications towards the age of ubiquitous cartography. Therefore we have to consider more specialized map functions like thematic cartography. Mobile mapping will not only be limited to navigation systems or typical LBS functions. There are more specialized map functions like thematic mapping that are interesting and will be important in future web-based applications. Therefore a standard covering these aspects is needed in order to allow interoperability. As current specifications only allow basic thematic mappings, we hereby propose an extension to a specification that is already widely used: The OGC Symbology Encoding (SE) as succesor of the SLD specification.