home about me blog photography web gis stuff contact news guestbook search  
Dan Karran

« Main | July 2006 archives

Drupal as a WFS

Recently I have been looking into the specifications for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Services (WFS) that provide a standard interface between geographic information systems (GIS) for the transfer of geodata.

I've been starting to think about it in terms of using the Drupal web framework as a geodata store that can be used by any standards compliant GIS. Drupal can already be considered a Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) so this seems like a natural extension to allow other systems to talk to it.

In GIS, the term 'layer' is usually used to group together geographic information relating to the same kind of feature, e.g. forests, places or roads. These are often stored in different files or different tables in a database. In Drupal the equivalent concept is a little more flexible and fine-grained. All of the information is stored in one place (with the ability to extend a basic piece of information with extra attributes) and can be filtered by any number of 'tags' that may be assigned to different pieces of information.

Using a WFS server as an interface to data held in Drupal would mean that systems would have access to any number of geographic datasets simply by combining tags to retrieve the data that they need.

I'm looking forward to putting more work into building up a spec for a WFS Server module for Drupal, and hopefully one day geographic information systems will be able to query Drupal for dynamic geodata, and even create, update and delete it as well.

Posted in , , at 2:32 PM on Thursday 27 July 2006 | Comments (4)
Tags:

My first paid Drupal site

Over the past week I've been working on building, theming and tweaking a new Drupal site for a friend. It's my first paid (as in, with chocolate) Drupal-based website outside of the ones we maintain at work, and it was great to be able to put into practice some of the tips and tricks I've picked up over the past eight months or so.

I'm quite pleased with the amount of work that Drupal removes from creating a website (steep learning curve aside), and how flexible it is out of the box, without even beginning to look into the many modules that you can plug and play with the framework. I'd say the majority of the time spent working on the site has been walking my friend through, showing her how to add new content, link it all together and all that good stuff.

The site went live today but isn't quite polished, so I'll leave the link off for now. At least until I've had a chance to make all those last minute tweaks that inevitably don't show up until you leave the nice comfortable environment of Safari and Firefox and see the thing torn to pieces in Internet Explorer.

Posted in , at 11:14 PM on Tuesday 25 July 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags:

Light festival in Stuttgart

Last night there was a festival of light (called Lichterfest in German) being put on here in Stuttgart. I didn't have any other plans, so I had decided to go there with my flatmates. The family of one of my flatmates was also visiting, so there were a party of us going.

We arrived just before the fireworks were to be set off, and had a chance to see some of the lanterns that were being carried around by visitors, and that were hung up around the park. The Killesbergturm had been lit up as well, giving a sort of focal point to the park. Soon, the fireworks were being set off in time to the music (sort of) and everybody was ooh-ing and ah-ing.

It brought back some nice memories of one of the first times (if not the first) that I had visited Switzerland when I was younger, and had a chance to go to a similar festival there. There are some photos on Flickr from last night's event, though I didn't actually get around to taking any myself.

Posted in at 9:48 PM on Sunday 16 July 2006 | Comments (3)
Tags:

Weekend mapping projects

I've been thinking for a month or so now about OpenStreetMap and things that I can do to help out the project - besides the data collection and mapping I've been doing since the start of the year.

It all began when I was wondering what the difference in cost would be to an organisation (Futuresonic in this case) between licensing Ordnance Survey data and actually going out and mapping an area themselves.

I wouldn't say the two data sources are directly comparable, but both could meet a given need for an organisation. Often the detail of the OS data would be overkill for orangisations wanting simple maps for context, and potentially very expensive depending on how it's used. OpenStreetMap data, on the other hand, may not have as good coverage - though with time and energy it can be easily extended - but it would be available without the cost.

So, one of the ideas that I've come up with recently is for weekend mapping projects. The basic idea of a weekend mapping project is that I would offer organisations, groups or individuals a weekend of my time to map as much of an area as I could feasibly do in a whole weekend (with extra time afterwards to convert the GPS traces and any annotations such as road names into usable map data).

I think it would be fair to ask for those people to pay for low cost flights from my base to their location, bike rental or something for the actual GPS track collection, and a small amount to cover some cheap accommodation and food for the time I'm there. In return they get free map data onto which they should be able to build, adding their own information and styling to make the maps unique to their own needs.

Why would I offer my limited free time to do this though? Well, quite simply, I really enjoy travelling and seeing new places. I'm also really interested in the idea of open, reusable, community-created content, especially in the form of OpenStreetMap for geographic data, but also Wikipedia for general reference information. So, if I can travel to new places and map them out to help expand the OpenStreetMap dataset, it's hitting on both of those desires in one go.

If anybody is interested, please do get in touch and we can talk through the details.

Updated 15 July with link to page on OSM wiki. Some other community members are interested too, and the more the better as that means sponsors would have a better chance of finding someone close to them, and so have lower travel costs.

Posted in , at 10:43 PM on Wednesday 12 July 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags:

National Pride

With today being Tynwald Day, the national day of the Isle of Man, and yesterday being Independence Day for Americans, it seems as good a time as any to write about what I've seen in Germany recently in relation to a massively boosted sense of national pride. Or at least visible national pride.

When I first arrived to live in Germany I didn't really notice it. But after a while, and after travelling to a few other places, I noticed a distinct lack of something here in Germany. Flags. Wherever I went there were very few black, red and gold German flags. It was only every now and then that it struck me how few and far between they seemed to be.

Then, in the run up to the World Cup here in Stuttgart, flags started to appear much more regularly. I think it's only natural that football would bring out people's desires to show their support for their team, especially when there are so many other countries coming to visit, each of whom will be doing exactly the same. But it's very strange to suddenly see so many flags, when previously there had been so few.

The sight of so many German flags around has been quite an impressive sight - and actually quite moving. It's not until you talk to local people about the distinct lack of flags - and sudden influx - that you start to realise how difficult it is for some to feel comfortable identifying with such a sense of national pride. The flag, and national pride, still seems to worry some people a little. Often where flags are flown, or identities associated with, they are of the region and not of the country as a whole.

As an outsider, or Auslander as we're known here, it's great to see that national pride, and from people I've spoken to, it gives them perhaps that little boost to know that outsiders see German people's national pride as a really positive thing.

This situation could well be different dependent on where in the country you are, and who you speak to, but it's something I've found fascinating, especially since the onset of the World Cup. It'll be interesting to see what happens with all the flags after the game has finished. I for one hope they keep flying high everywhere you look.

Posted in , at 11:56 PM on Wednesday 5 July 2006 | Comments (1)
Tags:

 

 

©1995-2008 Dan Karran. All rights reserved. View sitemap.