[ckan-dev] Summary of the CKAN Geo Community meeting

Thu Oct 13 16:12:16 UTC 2011

> * Closer integration with the web interface
> We would like to make easier for users to define the geographic extent
> of a dataset, via drawing a box or point on a map or using a geocoding
> service to extract location information from a place name (or a
> solution that combines both). The general agreement is that it will
> require a previous work of defining the UI and requirements right.
> We also want to integrate the spatial search into the web search form.
> In that case, the UI is not so complex (as is limited to the
> capabilities offered by the spatial API i.e. bbox), but the challenge
> will be integrate both the textual and spatial search, which right now
> are two different services.
> Maybe Sean Hammond will be able to give as a hand with one of this tasks.

I'd like to take on integrating the spatial search into the web search
form, but I need to take some time to learn my way around ckan
first. Today I've installed an Ubuntu 10.04.3 VM and got a ckan instance
installed and running from the latest source. I also installed
ckanext-spatial in my virtualenv:

    pip install --ignore-installed -e hg+https/bitbucket.org/okfn/ckanext-spatial#egg=ckanext

I'm now going to read the CKAN Admin Guide and play around with my ckan
instance a bit. I'll hang out on in #ckan in case anyone wants to give
me some pointers.