[ckan-dev] New geospatial features for CKAN

[Adrià Mercader]

We are pleased to announce the release of a set of new geospatial
features for CKAN, which are now live on the test server:

 http://test.ckan.net.

ckanext-spatial [1] offers support for adding geographic information
to datasets, enabling all kinds of cool things like spatial queries,
map mashups, integration with other GIS tools etc.

These are the latest features that we added:

* Geometries can be defined via the 'spatial' extra, in GeoJSON [2]
format. Check out these test datasets to get an idea of how the
spatial extent is used and see the newly added map showing the dataset
coverage:

http://test.ckan.net/dataset/test-dataset-extent-polygon
http://test.ckan.net/dataset/test-dataset-extent-point


* Datasets with geographic information can be queried via a new API
call that supports bounding box queries:

http://test.ckan.net/api/2/search/package/geo?bbox=-180,-90,90,180


* Another (experimental) feature is the ability to preview Web Map
Services (WMS). If a dataset has a resource with format 'WMS', a light
map viewer can be accessed to preview the service layers:

http://test.ckan.net/package/test-wms--wales-natural-risk-zones/map


You can learn more about these features visiting the following wiki page:

http://wiki.ckan.org/Geospatial_Capabilities

We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.
Also, for those of you who are interested in the geospatial
capabilities of CKAN, we are preparing an online meetup for the week
starting next 10th October. Stay tuned!


Looking forward for your comments,


Adrià


[1] https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckanext-spatial
[2] http://geojson.org