[Go to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI]
The Institute for Global Studies (in conjunction with OCM) is looking for ways to display some of our Geospatial data.
In normalspeak, we’ve got a lot of data that includes places. Places all over the globe. And we’re looking for ways to either showcase that data, or to make that data more accessible.
Much of this is stuff that others, John Callahan specifically, have been doing for some time. So we’re definitely benefiting from his trailblazing.
Our data is coming from two sources.
Source 1: SQL/Classic ASP
Nice and simple, this is generally the easiest place for us to generate data from, since we have pretty much 100% control of everything. If I were building new stuff I’d definitely be working with C#.NET, but for now, I’m working with an almost 10 year old website … so old is working just fine.
Source 2: Drupal/CCK/Views
Building the CCK and Views is easy … convincing Drupal to spit out the data in the format I want takes a little more work. However, it integrates my solution into my CMS of choice, and gives my users one place to go and one system to get used to.
Now, at this point we’ve also tested two solutions.
Solution 1: Google Maps API/KML
This solution was nice and simple, once we got some help from Ben Mearns in CS&S. Unfortunately, in the end, the solution had less ‘oomf’ than we wanted. My users wanted more than just ‘points on a map’, so we looked at another technology that OCM pointed us to, with some examples from John Callahan…
Solution 2: MIT’s Simile Exhibit Project/JSON
This has some wow factor. John’s showed this off before at DEWD meetings and I’ve been itching to get a chance to look into it since then. It does a lot more than just maps, but the mapping feature is a really nice way to show the technology off.
I’m going to try to put posts together to document each step of our process, as I believe that each part may have uses to different groups.
[Go to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI]
Your newest system is ready, I wanted to talk to you about when we could deploy it.
-Eric
