[ckan-dev] Map-building "IDE"

Mon Apr 18 10:15:45 UTC 2011

Yes, great stuff Adria - much appreciated.

I'd be interested to hear (in v. broad terms) what the CKAN
geo-related features we're considering implementing. I'm guessing it
could be some/all of these:
* Search filtered by bounding area (hence your mention of PostGIS)
* Search filtered/ordered by distance from a point or a place (hence
PostGIS & geocoding)
* Data preview that plots the data points onto a map (hence Mapnik)

David

2011/4/18 Seb Bacon <seb.bacon at okfn.org>:
> Adrià, thanks for your Sunday essay -- it's really interesting :)
>
> 2011/4/17 Adrià Mercader <amercadero at gmail.com>:
>> As you will have gathered, TileMill is a studio for styling and
>> creating tile sets.
>> It's a brilliant piece of software and one of the best existing
>> examples of what has been called "neo-geography" as opposed to
>> "paleo-geography". The neo vs paleo (or as I much prefer geohipsters
>> vs paleotards) has been the hot debate in the spatial world for the
>> last years. Everything in TileMill summarizes the philosophy of the
>> neogeos: Use tiling to maximize speed on web apps, Output projection
>> limited to Web Mercator (you can used different projections as input),
>> Styling through Carto (a CSS-like map styling language), etc even the
>> technology used, node.js and mapnik. On the other side of the spectrum
>> we find the INSPIRE world, with OGC based services and architecture,
>> the very definition of paleogeography.
>> As usual, I think both philosophies have high and lows and both fit
>> well in different scenarios.
>
> If you get a chance, I would be interested in the top-level background
> on the pros and cons.  Of course, you can tell me to be less lazy and
> find out for myself ;)
>
>> Regarding how to use the spatial libraries around for our needs, the
>> good news is that there are a lot of excel·lent Python spatial
>> libraries and frameworks around.
>> Mapnik [1] is used to create maps and is definitely having a lot of
>> momentum right now. Shapely [2] is used to perform spatial analysis,
>> which can also be performed with GeoAlchemy [3] + a spatial DB like
>> PostGIS (Or with GeoDjango [4], which is also really popular and with
>> some modules loosely coupled with django), Higher level frameworks
>> like MapFish [5] (built on Pylons) make really easy to create REST
>> spatial services. And of course there are also owslib (which we
>> already use), geojson, the ogr bindings...
>> Not sure on how OSM could be used though. I like Nominatim [6], the
>> OSM geocoder and reverse-geocoder that does not have the limitations
>> of the Google one.
>
> And what are those limitations?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Seb
>
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