[development] Place, Geotagging

[Arancaytar Ilyaran]

Steven Clift wrote:

> 1. Place - Many of the sites hosted on Drupal are local organizations
> with local content. What do you think of having a standard way Drupal
> (and other open source CMSes) allow sites to assign the geographic place
> name (or perhaps a point) that best represents either where their
> organization is based? How about an automatic map of Drupal sites or
> listings by hierarchical placename? Perhaps a connection to
> http://gaze.mysociety.org would work.
> 
> 2. GeoTagging - What do you think of defaulting or at least having the
> ability to assign a point, bounded place, or "global" geo-tag in terms
> of the general scope of individual content items created? An option
> changeable near a save/post button.
> 
> It seems to me that as long as geotagging is an afterthought, the
> ability to aggregate/navigate much of the newer and dynamic content on
> Drupal hosted sites by geographic relevancy will be quite limited.
> Imagine the power of just a few CMSes adopting a similar way to describe
> the place of sites (which could be "earth" for those who think the
> Internet is best when viewed as narrowly "global") and even more
> granular meta-data on specific content items as a default rather than an
> add-on.

1. There is a standard for geographical metadata. However, note that Drupal.org
isn't really in the business of networking individual Drupal sites, so any
website map would need to be hosted somewhere else on its own.

But if there were some kind of aggregating module for geodata, then a Drupal
site could provide exactly the service you're suggesting. The best part is that
it could map any website that implements the standard, not just other Drupal
sites. I don't think an aggregating module like this exists yet, but it could be
an interesting idea (perhaps for a GSoC 2009 project?).

2. Geotagging for individual posts already exists in the form of a contributed
module. I believe it is named "Location" (http://drupal.org/project/location).
It provides a good API and as far as I know there is a whole range of modules
working with it to give you anything from Google Map mashups to KML feeds that
can be imported into Google Earth.

-- 
Arancaytar
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