[ckan-dev] New feature: spatial filter

Wed Feb 22 15:17:49 UTC 2012

This looks great!

Perhaps it should use the right or middle mouse button to select an 
area, instead of having to use the onscreen button to enable a 
select-an-area mode? I've heard that modes in user interfaces confuse a 
lot of people. Then where it currently says "Click on the 'Select' 
button..." it could say something like:

1. Use the map controls or the mouse-wheel to zoom the map, drag with 
the left mouse button to pan the map.

2. Then drag with the right or middle mouse button to draw a square 
around an area of interest.

3. Then click 'Search'. The results will be limited to datasets related 
to the area you have marked.

I reordered the instructions to put them in the order that you actually 
have to do them.

You could also get rid of the Clear button, since whenever you draw a 
new region it automatically clears the old one anyway.

On 02/22/2012 03:17 PM, Adrià Mercader wrote:
> 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
>
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