Moabi and Big Important Challenges for the GeoWeb
Posted: April 23rd, 2012 | Author: mikel | Filed under: Moabi, tech | 2 Comments »Recently finished a technical review of WWF’s Moabi platform, their geodata sharing platform to track deforestation, and came out with some important technical challenges for the GeoWeb I want to share with the mapping nerds.
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Mikel: I’m thinking about these things, too.
I like to think 596acres.org gets close to making features (in this case, vacant lots) “full social objects.” Each lot has a page where you can leave comments and photos. Each can be “followed.” Etc. (eg, http://596acres.org/lot/3019120003/) I’ll be making new maps like this one soon, so I’m looking to make it more modular than it is now. I’m using GeoDjango and it would likely be built on top of that.
I’m also going to be working soon on some projects where it would make sense to have some of the data in OSM, but the rest of it won’t fit naturally into OSM. I haven’t really thought through this one yet, so I’d definitely be interested to hear about existing solutions.
Presuming all data is stored in Drupal, there are some excellent ways to speed up querying. We are currently working with search_api and solr. This allows us to build nice and fast faceted search functionality. The results of which can be displayed on a map. (or a list or a graph etc).
So far though, this is with a fixed datamodel.
Creating a key/value based fieldtype should not be the most difficult thing to do though.