I am new to drupal, web mapping technologies, groups.drupal and pretty much everything else in this space, so apologies for any faux-pas's vis a vis questions, posting locations, missing tags and what have you 8). tecjam inspired me to try posting up my own little project here to see if anyone might find the time to give me a little help on what to look at.
Basically, what I am hoping to discuss are the current options in Drupal 7 for working with map data, so I can focus my learning on modules and technologies that can actually get me where I want to go. I am hoping to avoid having to read source code for as long as possible ;).
The Goal:
What I am trying to build is an interactive map for displaying historical events. Some events might be associated with a region, others with specific points; some might have date ranges, others might have taken place on a particular date. I don't want a gantt chart for these events, although I would like eventually to build/find/steal from the timeline module their index widget for time periods to control what events are being displayed. Similarly, I'd love to figure out a good interface for defining a region of interest. It is also my intent to tag events and have them filterable by those tags. Ideally I'd like to be able to display custom back map plates (or whatever they are called in this space), potentially allowing a selection of backdrop plates as I find historic maps from various periods and tag them appropriately.
Now, I don't think I'm going to build all that all at once. So I'm breaking things down into smaller pieces. Some bits (the timeline style date range widget, and probably the tag filter widget) will have to be custom built by me, not provided by any existent module. But the other bits I imagine are relatively common use case/customization options in existing technologies/modules.
What I've Done So Far:
I have made some attempts to solve these issues myself. So far, I have gone through the Open Layers getting started links and built a basic Event view. I've wired in Geofield for location data in the Event content type using its provided map widget for setting locations. That works as far as it goes. I haven't figured out how to get much farther with Open Layers, though, as the documentation seems to be geared for people who already know how it works, and are looking at specific issues :/.
For the underlying map, I have been looking at using Tilemap to build a custom base map (with some success using Natural Earth 1.4 data they provide as I piece together what can be styled from there ;). I am assuming for the moment that I'll be able to display the resulting map using the Mapbox module in my Open Layers view.
The Primary Question (1): My basic question would be just about grounding. Am I looking at the right modules, or should I be using other technologies, etc.
Bonus First Pass Questions (more specific questions to get my first pass implementation working)
Question 2--Open Layers: (assuming this is the "right"/"reasonable" module for my goals...)
Question 2.1 : I'd like to be able to customize the data shown in the popup when you click on an event in the map view. Where can I find documentation on how to do this, or what are the keywords I should be searching on?
Question 2.2 : I'd like to be able to click on the map (where there isn't currently an event marker) and be taken to the Event node/add form seeded with the location I had selected. I'm not sure where to being to hook into that sort of UI action handler for Openlayers.
Question 2.3 : I'd like to be able to generate a context menu to allow for an option to add an event to a location which already had an event. As with 2.2, what should I be looking at?
Second Pass Questions
Question 3.1: Entering in region/line/polygonal data via the web in my drupal site.
Question 3.2: Creating arbitrary regions for display. I understand that Open Layers has a limit of about 500 displayed elements, so it may come to pass that I'd like to be able to define some custom data similar to what is provided by the Natural Earth files to be included in one of my base map layers, but I don't what tool I might want to use to generate that data. If anyone had some suggestions for what to use, particularly that would work with Tilemap assuming that is the right tool for custom map generation in the first place 8), that would be great.
I have read the comparison of modules wiki? here in this group, and the referenced mapping modules review (targeted at D6 modules :/), by the chap with the very nice map with the javascript ajax tag filter bit related to ecological clean up efforts in the gulf (and I think a bird sighting site in California, I forget now). Mostly the former confirmed that the latter was out of date for D7 ;). I've also been trying to decypher the Openlayer 2.0 documentation as well as the Tilemap documentation. I'm suspecting that I might get more traction if I read the 1.0 docs and then looked at the 2.0 docs for changes. Probably should have done that already... Anyway, any pointers, links, search terminology, etc. that folks can provide me with would be great!