[ckan-dev] New feature: spatial filter

Rufus Pollock rufus.pollock at okfn.org
Wed Feb 22 17:50:58 UTC 2012


On 22 February 2012 14:17, Adrià Mercader <amercadero at gmail.com> 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

This is awesome Adria!

(And apologies for temporarily taking that down just after you announced ...)

> 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).

Lovely.

> 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)

Definitely agree -- that gets us into the gazetteer discussion ;-)

> 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.

Agreed. Is there anything out of the box for this in openlayers (I
want this for HyperNotes [1] too!)

[1]: http://okfnlabs.org/hypernotes/
http://hypernotes.dev.okfn.org/tester/napoleon

> * 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.

Lovely!

Rufus




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