[drupal-devel] [feature] Adding GeoURL support

[ankur]

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/1048

 Project:      Drupal
 Version:      cvs
 Component:    node system
 Category:     feature requests
 Priority:     minor
 Assigned to:  Anonymous
 Reported by:  antoine
 Updated by:   ankur
 Status:       active

I was just searching for comments and posts related to geotagging nodes
and this thread came up.  If anyone is still following this, I'd like
to point you in the direction of the location framework I've been
working on recently: http://drupal.org/node/18723
It is currently comprised of a module that allows you to add a location
(which can be a full or partial mailing address) and the re-usable API
that the module is built on top of.  It includes geotagging for
geo-specific search engines and a search interface that currently takes
a postal code and search radius.  It hooks into the node system (and
node access system) using location_nodeapi (in location.module).
It's still in development stages and most of the architecturally hard
work has been done though there is still plenty of room for fixes and
modifications (see the issues queue for this project for a current list
of open tasks: http://drupal.org/project/issues/18723)
Locations just seem like something that would have a natural place on a
number of community-driven sites when it comes to translating an online
organization into real, physical world presences whether it is through
events or geographically targetted community e-mails and the like.
I can't imagine all the uses there could be, but I imagine pinpointing
locations (and making them easily accessible via deep-links to mapping
services, map plotting, etc) to be really helpful to people trying to
organize/target community members in a way that can open up a door for
Drupal in a CMS arena by being a platform that prevents virtual
communities from dissipating into the virtual Ether of the internets.
  -Ankur


ankur



Previous comments:
------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 21, 2003 - 14:05 : antoine

Is it possible to add a plugin to Drupal that automaticaly 'GeoCodes'
(adds longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates to a post as metadata) a
node?
Someone has done the same for Moveable Type at
http://geourl.org/mt.html
This feature would allow a poster to identify the geographical location
of the subject matter, and nearby blogs.
ref: http://www.geourl.org


------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 12, 2003 - 04:53 : al

I'm not sure how good an idea this is. Do you mean every node in the
system to have a geocode? Most of them would be the same...
If you submit identical geocode coordinates to the geocode database
more than one, presumably it adds many nodes, which isn't the desired
behaviour.
It might be nice to have positional coordinates for a particular user.
Then you could add the geocode information to just their blog. You'd
submit the blog to the central geocode database automatically every
time they updated their coordinates, but you'd only submit the one page
(http://foo.com/blog/).
What do people think?


------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 8, 2003 - 13:58 : Damon

i think it would be an awesome feature


------------------------------------------------------------------------

August 3, 2004 - 13:02 : Anonymous

GeoURL is really cool. For instance, one can visualize the posts on a
map, like http://www.brainoff.com/geoblog/. Latest version of the
worldkit even lets you click on a map, and write a blog entry with
pre-filled coordinates.
The way I would like to see it done is:
On the user interface side:
1) Add lat/long to user preferences
2) Pre-fill each new node with users default lat/long
3) replace default coordinates with explicitely provided ones if "add
node" is called with "&lat=&lon=" (worldkit does it).
4) Let the user edit the coordinates if he/she feels like it.
On the DB side: 
Add a GIS "Point"
(http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/GIS_class_point.html) to user
profiles and to each node. This way we could use all the spacial
relation functions to easily fetch blogs from a certain area (100km
around Vienna, and such).
Once this is done, it would be easy to do all kinds of nice tricks:
* show posts on a map, the way geoblog does
* find bloggers near me
* RSS feed with all the posts 100km around Vienna
* events geovisualisation
* "on the road" blog
Deno (can't log-in at the moment)


------------------------------------------------------------------------

August 3, 2004 - 13:27 : Deno

OK, here I am again. Two more points:
1) Here is an example of how the latest WorldKit and MT work together
to produce something really cool. Please don't polute the map.
  http://brainoff.com/weblogs/blogtalk/map/
2) MySQL spatial extensions have been introduced in MySQL 4.1
  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Spatial_extensions_in_MySQL.html
I like this GeoURL stuff, and may be able to help with coding if you
decide to introduce this extension to Drupal.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

August 3, 2004 - 13:43 : JonBob

This doesn't seem like something that is so globally useful that it
should be part of the core. On the other hand, I think it should be
fairly easy to implement this in a module without touching the core
anyway. You could use hook_nodeapi() to display the fields you need on
node forms, save the information, and display it at view time.