WFS
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...
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.
