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Dan Karran

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A new Bed & Breakfast in the Isle of Man

Screenshot of Cronk-e-Dhooney websiteI'm proud to launch the new website for the Bed and Breakfast accommodation at Cronk-e-Dhooney Cottages in the Isle of Man.

Recently awarded a four star rating and located in the hamlet of Ballakilpheric near Colby, the cottage is just a short drive from the airport, the golden beach and sunset views of Port Erin, the working village folk museum at Cregneash, the historic capital of the Island at Castletown, and many more things for visitors to see.

If you're looking for a comfortable, family-run B&B in the middle of the beautiful Manx countryside - perfect for outdoor activities such as walking, cycling or just as a base for exploring the Island - look no further than Cronk-e-Dhooney.

The website is based on Drupal to make it easily maintainable, includes some mapping from OpenStreetMap and also photos that I took in and around the property to help show it off to prospective visitors.

Posted in , at 10:00 PM on Sunday 27 April 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Holiday cottages on Drupal

Manx farm holidays in Smeale, Isle of ManLast night saw the launch of the new Smeale Farm Cottages website (first launched back in 2000), helping market a new holiday cottage that they recently opened.

The new site features an improved availability calendar that makes it both easier to maintain and easier for visitors to understand as well as the ability for the customer to edit any of the pages themselves whenever they want to change any of the information.

Also featured is a location map thanks to data from the OpenStreetMap project.

As you might expect, the website is built using the Drupal open source content management system with the addition of the image module, a customised version of the zen theme and a heavily customised availability module to drive the calendars.

I'm hoping to release this availability calendar module back to the community as a new module in the near future.

Posted in , , at 7:41 PM on Thursday 7 February 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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DrupalCon attendee map


View Larger Map | download KML file

The map above shows the approximate locations of over 400 of the DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 attendees, based on the city or country they entered when registering for this year's DrupalCon. People travelled from every continent except Antarctica (maybe next year?) to visit the conference though most attendees travelled from Europe or the US.

If you're reading in an RSS reader, or if you prefer using Google Earth rather than Google Maps, you may want to load up the KML file, otherwise you'll need to move the map around a little to make Google Maps load all the locations for you.

(Sorry for all the pushpins. I was hoping to move beyond pushpins but the GeoCommons server didn't seem to like my file, probably due to the lack of attribute data in it.)

Posted in at 8:32 PM on Monday 24 September 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 this week

DrupalCon Barcelona 2007Tomorrow I'll be traveling down to Barcelona with my colleagues for this year's DrupalCon.

Much like last year's OSCMS Summit (which basically turned into a DrupalCon) and DrupalCon Brussels it will be a great chance to meet up with other Drupal developers and users, see what others are using the platform for, join in discussions about its future and hopefully promote some of the pieces that we've been developing at work or have sponsored.

I'll hopefully be doing a lightning talk on the use of Drupal as a GeoCMS - if there are enough people interested - perhaps demonstrating some Google Earth integration through the KML module, GeoRSS integration, or even WFS integration (if I can get it working before then).

If you're going to DrupalCon and are interested in the geo aspect of Drupal (or geo in general), let me know or catch me there - I'll be the one with the 'geodaniel' name badge.

Posted in , , at 12:03 PM on Monday 17 September 2007 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Timestamp and address support in KML module

In addition to the recently implemented views support in Drupal's KML module, the latest Drupal 5 version of the module now adds support for time and addresses.

Each of the placemarks now has a timestamp based on its creation date in your Drupal site, allowing you to filter your content by a specific time frame using the Time controls in Google Earth.

Also, if you have added address information to your nodes then this will be added to the placemarks as well (in both freeform format and the xAL standard), allowing content to show up in Google Earth even if you haven't added specific coordinates to it through your Drupal site. The geocoding is down to Google Earth and sometimes things will default to 0,0 if it isn't able to work out where in the world it should go.

Posted in , at 11:10 AM on Tuesday 21 August 2007 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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How the GeoCMSs compare

At the State of the Map conference it was great to be able to meet up with two guys who also have interests in creating geographically able content management systems (GeoCMS), Andrew Turner who created the GeoPress plugin for MovableType and WordPress and Henri Bergius who is one of the founders of the Midgard CMS.

Before their talk on GeoClue we had a good opportunity to sit down and talk through some of the current functionality of the different systems, see where they differ, and try to agree on some common base functionality that we felt should be present across the different platforms.

The features included things like ability to save a location (obviously), how many locations could be used to reference each post, the presence of maps and which providers they used, the ability to post location information through the blogging API, the inclusion of Microformats (hCard), syndication formats (GeoRSS, KML, etc.), OpenSearch capabilities, reverse geocoding of coordinates to give place information, posting by email, and a couple of others.

When I get a chance I'm going to build up a table over on the Geospatial Content Management System Wikipedia page to compare the systems we talked about (WordPress, Midgard and Drupal) but also others such as Joomla, TikiWiki and Plone. Any input on those would be much appreciated as I haven't done much with them to date.

Update: I didn't notice that Henri had already blogged a little about this, and after the conference went off and added maps to Midgard using Mapstraction... cool!

Posted in , , at 5:06 PM on Wednesday 18 July 2007 | Comments (1)
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Views support in Drupal's KML module

To set up a KML feed in Drupal all you need to do, after downloading the latest Drupal 5 version of KML module, is create a new view, enable the 'page' display for that view and choose 'KML feed' as the format to display. You can then filter it by anything you wish, sort it in different ways and feed it arguments to filter it down even further on the fly (untested, but should work).

If you want to use that feed as a self-refreshing network link, point the user at http://www.example.com/kml/view/<viewname>/networklink

I haven't had a chance yet to test it all thoroughly but it appears to work just fine. Any feedback and testing appreciated though, as always.

Posted in at 6:22 PM on Monday 16 July 2007 | Comments (1)
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Finding Drupal sites from Google Earth

I love finding new sites that use the Drupal KML module, and seeing what they're doing with it. The great thing about it is that it can be used for absolutely anything that has associated location information, so every site out there can be a site about something completely different to the previous one.

The site I discovered today is an Ontario real estate website, listing houses for sale and their locations, but also events and other such things. Not only are they able to add a 'kml' link to each relevant page, allowing the user to click through to Google Earth and see the location, but they are also able to have people find their properties through Google Earth itself.

For a while Google has been indexing KML feeds (ones from Drupal included) and allows their content to be searched in Google Earth. To take an example, there is a $300k townhome in Newmarket, Ontario for which the realtor has added location information to the node in Drupal. Try doing a search for 'townhome in Newmarket' whilst in Google Earth, and you'll see that property show up as the first in the list of web search results.

The KML module can help bring your information to a completely new set of users, or potential customers in the case of the Jasmina Homes site.

How do I know about what sites are using the module? Well, I've started keeping track of of them through the Google Alerts service, monitoring any site that has links with kml/node in them.

Posted in , at 9:55 AM on Friday 11 May 2007 | Comments (1)
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Geo brings people to Drupal

I recently discovered the iCommunity.tv localised video news site (via High Earth Orbit) and was especially interested as it was being run on Drupal.

This was one of the first places out on the internet that I'd seen Drupal's KML module being put to good use, for example to be able to view in Google Earth all of the citizen journalist videos from YouTube that are tagged as being from the city you're interested in (e.g. Stuttgart video news and its associated KML feed of Stuttgart video news). Grass roots journalism is only useful to readers if the content is filtered to your needs, if it's in the area you want to know about and it's the type of news that you're looking for. The iCommunity.tv site does that by tagging videos by location (both coordinates and the name of the nearest city) and by topic (politics, community life, arts, etc.) and lets you filter by a combination of those*.

I heard back from Chris Haller of iCommunity.tv after posting a comment on his announcement of the site. He told me that he was previously a Mambo/Joomla user, attracted to Drupal both by its flexibility and by its geo-capabilities. It's great to see that happening, and someone told me exactly the same thing yesterday too. It's also great that organisations like the Open Source Geospatial Foundation are using Drupal as their platform of choice.

Its good to see Drupal becoming more and more of a GeoCMS and people taking the tools and finding ways to apply them in useful and practical ways.

* KML feeds for multiple tags do not currently work in the KML module, as I've just discovered

Posted in , , at 10:25 AM on Thursday 1 March 2007 | Comments (0)
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Machine Tags in Drupal

When I started work on the OpenStreetMap module for Drupal towards the end of last year I got pretty much to a point where I'd implemented the basics, and then slowed down as I pondered how best to proceed. The tagging in Drupal of objects from the OpenStreetMap database was perhaps the biggest issue to consider, and with Christmas in the way I didn't get much further on with it.

Everything of interest in OpenStreetMap is either tagged (e.g., a point of interest or a whole road) or helps build up other structures that are themselves tagged (such as junctions, or vertices, in roads). The tags aren't simple 'tags' as are commonly used in Flickr, del.icio.us, or any other Web-2.0ey site you may be familiar with, but are instead key-value pairs consisting of, for example, key=amenity, value=cinema (often simply written as amenity=cinema for brevity).

These tags are similar in style to some advanced tags that have been used by a growing number of people on Flickr and other sites for a while, notably those such as geo:lat=54.2, geo:lon=-4.4 to denote the location of a photo. Nothing had ever been formalised though, so those tags were listed amongst the other simple tags, looking a little out of place. That is, until recently, with the launch of machine tags on Flickr, announcing that they will be supporting this more advanced usecase even better. You can read more about all this over on Dan Catt's blog.

Examples of these advanced tags, triple tags, or machine tags in terms of OpenStreetMap could be openstreetmap:amenity=cinema, openstreetmap:name="Palace Cinema".

But for the OpenStreetMap module, where I want to store this advanced tag information within the context of the Drupal taxonomy system, I'm left a little boggled as I consider the way ahead. Sure, I could save these tags 'as is' in the taxonomy system using the triple tags style noted above. But that means they're basically just treated as simple tags, even if they look a little different, and wouldn't necessarily be easily filterable (e.g., looking for all cinemas). Another option was to go off and implement a custom tagging system just for this module, but that didn't make much sense either.

I think what's really needed is a Machine tags module that plugs into the existing taxonomy system which is in the core of Drupal. The question is, should the taxonomy system be used as normal, storing the triple tags in full, and then have another module that allows the extraction, display and use of those tags more flexibly. Or, should there be an option in the core taxonomy system of creating a taxonomy that can store those machine tags in a better way, perhaps in a separate table that has columns for the each of namespace, key and value, or perhaps even different tables for each. The extra module to display and reuse those tags would probably still be necessary, tieing into the taxonomy data and allowing it to be used in different ways.

Posted in at 8:58 PM on Saturday 27 January 2007 | Comments (1)
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KML and GeoRSS now ready for Drupal 5.0

Over the past few days I've been readying the KML module (thanks to AjK for starting the work) and the GeoRSS module for new releases that will work on the latest, shiny, version of the Drupal content management platform: Drupal 5.0.

They are both now ready (with the exception of some minor bugs and some feature requests) and there are a number of bits I need to backport to the 4.7 version of KML module to ensure it starts working again with recent updates to the Location module. I also need to make sure that GeoRSS module is consuming feeds properly from the successor to Aggregator2, Leech, as well as Feedparser.

I've also been helping out a little with the port of Location module as it is an essential part of getting the two modules to produce their geodata. It's not quite ready to be tagged as being ready for Drupal 5.0 but most of it is already working in this release.

If you're interested in any of these modules, please try them out and report any bugs in their issue trackers. If you have any ideas for future features, please also add them in there. Ideas (and patches, if possible) are always welcomed!

Posted in , , at 9:23 AM on Thursday 25 January 2007 | Comments (2)
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Furthering the OpenStreetMap module

Having started implementing a Drupal module for OpenStreetMap back in October I have spent a few hours here and there on pushing it forwards. Here's a quick update.

The module is at a stage now where you can download data for a specific region from OpenStreetMap, parse it, filter it by certain tags (and their values, if desired) and then create basic location-enabled Drupal nodes based on the results. Because it ties into the existing location module any other modules which rely on the location API can begin to use these new OpenStreetMap nodes, for example by plotting them on a map, by making the information available through RSS feeds or by displaying them in Google Earth.

I also started working on an OpenLayers module, and at work have been putting effort into improving the MapBuilder module that Nedjo Rogers started a year or so ago. Both of these modules will allow us to reduce dependence in Drupal on commercial mapping providers, instead moving towards using data from other, standards compliant, sources.

Assuming there aren't too many distractions over the coming week or so, I hope to have at least an alpha-quality OpenStreetMap module available soon. Phase one of the module will simply be allowing site admins to keep their local information site up-to-date with geodata from OpenStreetMap. Future phases will almost certainly allow for editing of data and the publishing of that back to the OpenStreetMap project.

Posted in , at 10:29 PM on Monday 18 December 2006 | Comments (0)
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Geodan becomes Geodaniel

Geodan, the nickname I had adopted in the world of Drupal, has now become Geodaniel.

Both Geodan and Geodaniel are a play on the fact I'm called Dan (or Daniel, if you take my actual first name) and love geospatial things. The former, however, is (unfortunately for me) also a trademark of Geodan, a company based in the Netherlands that specialises in geo-information. Working in the same area as I'm interested in, and with the same name, they were understandably worried that I was creeping up the search rankings for the term 'geodan'. In light of this, last week they contacted me and politely told me to stop using the geodan.org domain.

In need of a new home for my Drupal geospatial interests, I went searching for somewhere else I could stake my claim. This time, hopefully, without unintentionally breaching anyone's intellectual property. Luckily they didn't mind me using Geo Daniel as a nickname, so today I started transitioning geodan.org over to geodaniel.org - the new geospatial testbed for Drupal.

As for developments in the geospatial world of Drupal, I haven't had much of a chance at work of late to do much in that area. It has been great over the past few weeks though, hearing from lots of people who are using, or wanting to use, Drupal as their Geospatial Content Management system.

Posted in at 10:03 PM on Monday 13 November 2006 | Comments (0)
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OpenStreetMap module for Drupal

For quite some time now I've been thinking about the best way to create a mapping and local information site for the Isle of Man - what will become Mapping.im once ready. Currently it's a very bare, ugly site, so don't pay too much attention to it. Working with the Drupal content management system so much, I naturally thought of that as the way forward, largely because of its flexibility but also because it gives me a good head start in developing a site that can do all sorts of things already, without me having to implement them individually.

I had jotted down some notes in the past about what I wanted out of a site, but never really got quite as far as implementation details. Then earlier this week I went to an old haunt of mine - an Irish bar by where I lived in the first few months of being here in Stuttgart - and sat down with my notepad and pen (both of which I carry at all times). I wanted to start jotting down some more fine grained requirements for what I want, and how I may go about integrating this into Drupal as a module that other people can apply for their own local areas as well.

Then last night I started coding the OpenStreetMap module up. I'm hoping - as long as I can spend enough time on the project - that I will soon have the ability to create a local information site for the Isle of Man, based on top of a map from the OpenStreetMap project to which I've already contributed a large amount of data for the island to get the mapping process started. (Since I started earlier this year a number of other people have joined in to flesh out that data even more, which is handy because being in Germany right now, I can't add too much).

I would have spent the weekend working on the module but I'm actually travelling over to Munich in the morning to meet up with a bunch of OpenStreetMappers for a Mapping Weekend to map the centre of Munich.

Posted in , , at 9:35 PM on Friday 20 October 2006 | Comments (0)
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First install of Drupal 5.x

I installed what will be Drupal 5.x on my computer last night for the first time and was amazed at how easy it was to set up and get it working out of the box. Drupal 5.x is still in development but it's possible to download the current snapshot and try it out - and it seems like it's not too far from being ready for release.

After downloading the latest version of Drupal to my computer, accessing it through the web browser, it now gives a friendly screen telling you to give the correct permissions on the configuration file instead of giving SQL errors as 4.7 had done. Once I'd set those permissions, I was taken to a configuration screen that asks for database information (which I still had to set up by hand, though in the future this step may also be done for you) and that was it. Click the button and Drupal is ready to go. No more worrying about importing database tables and everything, it's all taken care of by the installer now.

I've not had a proper look around yet but the overhaul of the administration section seems to break things down into much more understandable areas (content, users, site configuration, etc) than the previous flat listing of everything. It may take me a while to find where some things have moved to, but it's a great step forwards in making Drupal more friendly to site administrators.

I'll be starting to upgrade my modules for 5.x soon, though I am planning to continue support for the 4.7 branch for some time still.

Posted in at 2:40 PM on Tuesday 17 October 2006 | Comments (0)
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Licensing information in Drupal feeds

After releasing the Drupal GeoRSS module the other day, I sent a message to the GeoRSS mailing list. It created some positive responses and an interesting question back from Andrew Turner of the High Earth Orbit blog, who is interested in giving people the ability to create their own personal geospatial aggregators. He's done some work in this area already, in the form of Mapufacture, a geospatial aggregator that allows people to specify regions they would like to receive feeds for.

When you start to look at aggregating and redistributing information you should really be clear about the licensing of the information that is being brokered. How is it licensed, what are the restrictions, etc? Hence Andrew's question to me was whether Drupal has any way of specifying applicable licenses for its outgoing feeds. I hadn't heard of anything in the community, but whilst researching the area today I came across some Creative Commons syndication examples and also spoke to Boris Mann of Bryght - one of the biggest Drupal shops - about whether this had been implemented in Drupal already.

It turns out it has: the Creative Commons module allows Creative Commons license information to be added per feed or overridden on a per node basis. I need to do some more research into whether there are more general extensions that support other types of licenses than just Creative Commons, but it's a great start.

The next step would be to ensure license information is extracted from feeds being pulled into Drupal by the likes of aggregator2 module and its successor(s). It's becoming clearer from looking more and more into the flow of data into and out of Drupal that there are lots of use cases for ensuring standards compliant information can be pulled from feeds and applied to nodes in Drupal and then also included in outgoing feeds.

Off the top of my head, we have the basic information itself - title, body, author, date, etc - and also additional information such as location, event data, license and enclosures of different types, as well as numerous others presumably. Each module should listen for new nodes being created by an aggregator module (using Drupal's extensive hook system) and handle any elements from the incoming feed as required - so the GeoRSS module would handle geodata, the event module would handle calendar dates, times, venues, etc, the Creative Commons module would deal with licensing information, and so on.

Posted in at 11:11 PM on Sunday 24 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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GeoRSS to KML through Drupal

I was working at the end of last week on pulling GeoRSS-enabled feeds into Drupal and attaching the location information for each item to the nodes created from each item. Once it's within the flexible world of Drupal, all the benefits of having attached geodata then apply.

With the number of GeoRSS enabled feeds around the world slowly growing, the opportunity to make your own geospatial mashup machine (borrowing the name slightly from Zacker's Drupal Mashup Machine screencast) is now here.

Much of the functionality was already there in contributed modules - aggregator2 module to pull in feeds (not sure what's going to happen to this module in the future) and location module to store location data for nodes. Then my recently released KML module can feed all of this information back out in different ways (eg by tags assigned to the incoming feeds), GMap module can display them on top of Google Maps.

The only part that was missing was the bit to pull geodata from the incoming RSS feeds, based on the GeoRSS standards, of which Version 1 was released last week. To do this I created a little module (GeoRSS module) that tied aggregator2 module and the location API together.

The functionality here overlaps slightly with the location module in that it already inserted geographic information into RSS feeds being sent out by Drupal, but I prefer to use the module as an API to store the information and then extend it in other ways. In the future the GeoRSS module could be extended to deal with more complex geodata than simple points, being able to cope with lines and areas as well if that time comes along and people have that need.

Posted in , , at 2:35 PM on Thursday 21 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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Drupal KML module released

Tonight saw the release of the KML module I've been working on for the Drupal content management system. The main features of the module currently include the ability to:

  • add a KML link to the bottom of all spatially enabled nodes
  • view all spatially enabled nodes in Google Earth
  • view nodes tagged with a certain term
  • view nodes from within a group
  • view search results
  • determine order of nodes that are displayed in Google Earth, allowing for alphabetical or time-based flythroughs of nodes for example.

If you are interested in this module, please feel free to try it out. You can see parts of the module in action over at geodan.org/kml-module.

It's been developed on Drupal 4.7 and the source is available in the CVS repository or as a package. If you come across bugs or things that aren't working as expected, please add them (along with any suggestions or feature requests) to the issue tracker on drupal.org.

It took me a while to get to grips with using CVS and specifically MacCVSClient (to add to SVN which I also recently got to grips with) but finally I managed to import the module source to the Drupal CVS repository. I think I still need to tag it to make sure it's packaged properly from the module description page and therefor easier to download, but that can wait until the morning.

Posted in , , at 11:24 PM on Monday 4 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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Design for geodan.org

Design for geodan.orgGeodan.org has a new theme, for the most part at least. I got the basics done on Monday night having begun with the basic bluemarine theme that Drupal ships with and has enabled by default. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted to acheive with the theme and it didn't take me too long to get it into a state that I was relatively happy with.

It's best viewed in Firefox or Safari at the moment as I can't get the opacity levels to have any effect in Internet Explorer. It's just no good if you can't see the earth through the body of the page (thanks go to NASA for that beautiful Blue Marble image of the earth).

Posted in , , at 11:11 PM on Wednesday 23 August 2006 | Comments (0)
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Drupal geospatial testbed

It's been long enough that I've been working with Drupal and not had a site of my own that runs off it. I'd love to migrate dankarran.com to Drupal but it would take some time to migrate. So for now I will leave this site as it is and create a new site aimed at demonstrating Drupal as a Geospatial Content Management System.

geodan.org will be a testbed for geospatial functionality within Drupal. I'll be using existing modules such as the location module which gives a basis for handling geographic information about users and nodes in a site, gmap module which allows for Google Maps to be easily created, as well as a number of others. In addition to these I'll be adding the KML module I've been working on as part of my day job, and also the WFS Server module which still has a little way to go before it's ready.

Right now it's just a shell, but over time it will grow. And as it seems somebody over at the OGC recently picked up on my last post about Drupal as a WFS I should try and make that sooner rather than later...

Posted in , , , at 12:09 PM on Monday 21 August 2006 | Comments (0)
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Stuttgart JAG site launch

Preview of Jugend Arbeitsgruppe Greenpeace Stuttgart website

One of my colleagues reminded me today that I hadn't linked to the Drupal site I mentioned last week. So, here's the link to the Jugend Arbeitsgruppe Greenpeace Stuttgart, a site for youths in Stuttgart interested in Greenpeace.

It's still not quite polished, but I think it's looking pretty good for now.

Posted in , at 10:45 PM on Tuesday 1 August 2006 | Comments (0)
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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)
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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)
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The importance of interoperability

When a colleague asked me today if I knew any way of converting XML to CSV, I was up for the challenge. It turned out that all she wanted to do was import event information into Google Calendar from Groove. Simple, right?

Google liking to follow standards, they allow you to import iCal feeds and even let you import CSV files from Outlook (because that's presumably the main userbase and Outlook doesn't export iCal). But try to import the XML export from Groove, and it tells you - rightly - that it's broken and it can't understand it. Admittedly it's not a format that Google says it can import, but from looking at the file, it does look very broken.

Why have an export facility in Groove that allows you to "export Calendar events for importing into another Calendar tool" when it exports in some propietary format that no other programs read? Just because it's XML doesn't necessarily mean it's interoperable. Groove doesn't even let you export as old-school CSV.

In the end it took the enabling of the "publish all events to Outlook" option, then going into Outlook to export the CSV, and only then is there a usable file that we can import into Google Calendar. It shouldn't be that difficult, should it?

I'm glad Drupal supports iCal - even if it doesn't allow for imports yet. With node_import, it at the very least allows imports of CSV calendar files.

Posted in at 2:58 PM on Tuesday 30 May 2006 | Comments (5)
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PfP using Drupal

It was great to see yesterday that Dries Buytaert - the founder and lead of the Drupal project - had showcased one of the Drupal sites we have created at work. The Partnership for Peace Training Centers website is one of over forty that we have built using the Drupal platform.

The PfP Training Centres Website is a common endeavour between PIMS, PRIME and NATO, and is intended to demonstrate the potential for future collaboration in the Euro-Atlantic community.

Posted in at 12:13 AM on Sunday 7 May 2006 | Comments (3)
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Searching by location in Drupal

There have been great improvements to search in Drupal 4.7 including the ability to extend it to search content from different modules. What I'd like to do is incorporate location into the search (instead of being a separate tab as it presently is using the location.module), allowing people to type their search text, choose which node types they'd like to search and then type in the name of a place (eg a city) they'd like to search near to.

To simplify the input, the new AJAX autocomplete functionality could be used to suggest places based on the name you're typing in. The co-ordinates of this place could then be used to filter the nodes that were returned from the search and allow for the ordering of search results by distance if desired.

I'm conscious that a search screen should be as simple as possible, but think this would be a useful addition for people who wanted to search for things by location. Perhaps allowing people to type '[searchstring] near Stuttgart, Germany' would be a better way of allowing location based searching. The autocomplete could still be used for that as well, by autocompleting only the bits after a 'near' statement.

Any input from the community is welcome, including thoughts on the interface and on how the back end hooks in the search system may best be put into place.

Posted in at 7:18 PM on Thursday 23 February 2006 | Comments (0)
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Location-based functionality within Drupal

Having laid out last week some of the overall location-related functionality I'd like to see within Drupal, I wanted to start a proper list of areas around which I would like to see development within the Drupal community. I'll be putting effort into creating and improving many of these, and hopefully working with others who want to help as well.

I've broken down the functionality into three sections of the data flow - incoming data, internal processing and display, outgoing data and external systems. Please feel free to leave comments on which bits you'd like to see sooner rather than later, and any extra functionality that I've missed off the list.

  • Incoming data
    1. Ability to tag individual nodes in system with location information
      • by address (functionality already exists)
      • by clicking map
      • by coordinates
    2. Ability to extract location information from EXIF tags in jpg images
    3. Ability to automatically extract location of items from incoming feeds
      • from RSS feeds (using the geo namespace or GeoRSS implementation)
      • from KML feeds?
      • from GML feeds?
  • Internal processing and display
    1. Ability to search near location
      • by address (currently can search near zipcodes only)
      • by city/country
      • by clicking on map (or entering coordinates)
    2. Listing of similaraly tagged nodes nearby
    3. Mapping
      • Simple visualisation
      • Mapping nodes on top of imagery
        • Google Maps
        • Yahoo Maps
        • Maps from a GIS (eg MapServer)
      • GIS functionality
        • Point in polygon analysis (for example, to find which region a point lies in - useful for determining which country a pair of coordinates lies in, or which administrative district a point lies in)
      • Community map creation
      • Map of nodes with ability to filter by users, buddies, location, etc
  • Outgoing data
    1. Export any Drupal page as a feed (or layer) - e.g. search terms, tags, node types etc
      • RSS feeds with location imformation embedded
      • KML feeds
      • GML layers (using WFS from OGC to allow data output capabilities to be determined)
    2. Ability to filter by geographic location, user, content type etc
    3. Ability to export single points
      • links to maps (functionality already exists)
      • link to Google Earth placemark (complete)
  • External systems
    1. Creation of a geocoding system that can be accessed and queried by other systems (including Drupal) through a RESTful style XML interface - similar to Mikel Maron's geocoder

updated 16th February 2006

Posted in , , at 2:02 PM on Tuesday 14 February 2006 | Comments (3)
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After the OSCMS summit

The OSCMS summit is now over, but it's been a great week, packed full of information and activities. I've met a number of the other people interested in using Drupal for location-enabled activities, from simply tagging of content with a geographic location, to mapping those locations (and others) and actually implementing more GIS-like functionality.

One of the things I really want to see happen (and will certainly be helping with) is making sure that we are complying to standards of geographic data sharing so that information from outside the Drupal framework can be pulled into Drupal, and information can similarly be pushed out and used by other systems - from Drupal sites (through GeoRSS feeds - or the other GeoRSS standard being proposed), to Google Earth (using KML) and also systems capable of reading in OGC-compliant feeds (probably implementing a WFS interface).

Improving the usability and functionality of inputting geographic information is also high on my priority list, trying to get away from the largely US-centric input that is present at the moment. Of course, that's not easy when the availability of reliable and open geographic data is scarce outside of the USA.

I'll be keeping track on here of the bits I'm working on - and others are working on - here in my blog over time.

Posted in , , at 8:05 PM on Friday 10 February 2006 | Comments (1)
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OSCMS Summit

I'm lucky enough to be flying out tomorrow to go to the OSCMS Summit (that's Open Source Content Management Systems) which is being held in Vancouver this week.

The summit will be my first chance to meet some of the large community of open source developers that support the Drupal project that much of the work I'm currently doing is based on.

I'm particularly interested in the location aspects, how it can be improved and what new functionality can be implemented to improve the spatial awareness of sites run using Drupal. It's great to see such a large crowd of people have signed up for the geodata workshop on Wednesday so it ought to be a great opportunity to meet others interested in the same area and work together on producing some great new features.

Posted in , , at 9:56 PM on Sunday 5 February 2006 | Comments (0)
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