[ckan-dev] New feature: spatial filter

Wed Feb 22 14:17:36 UTC 2012

Hi all,

I would love to hear your feedback about this new feature we've been
working on. If you head to

http://test.ckan.net/dataset

you will see a small "Filter by location" link under the main search
bar. Clicking on it will show a map widget where you can draw your
area of interest.

Have a play around, I added geographic information to some of the
datasets: 2 in Berlin, 1 in Rwanda and 1 in Vancouver. Note that you
can use th spatial filter on its own or combined with whatever query
you have on the main input field. (e.g selecting an area around Berlin
and querying for "Stratospheric" should only return a result).
I'm particularly interested in the usability of it and how it
integrates with the current search. Note also that at some point we
want to support textual geoqueries (i.e typing "Newcastle" instead of
drawing a box over it, see below)

FAQs:

* How do I geo-reference a dataset?
Right now the only way is creating a spatial extra with a GeoJSON [1]
value describing the geometry.
See e.g:
http://test.ckan.net/dataset/bsds
http://test.ckan.net/dataset/vancouver-open-data-catalogue

* This is not very convenient.
The next piece of work will be working on a small editor on the
dataset form where you can draw the geometry directly on top of a map.

* This is nice in some use cases, but wouldn't be nice to just type
"Berlin" when searching or creating a geometry?
Definitely! Once we have a full set of tools for working at a lower
level with geometries (basically the only thing that is missing is the
previous point), we will work on integrating gazetteers
(georeferencing) so users don't need to worry about geometries.

Cheers,

Adrià

[1] http://geojson.org