It looks like nationalgeographic.com has added a Drupal website to support its archeological search for Mongolian ruins. http://exploration.nationalgeographic.com/mongolia/ Although the mapping and satellite tiles are in Flash the rest of the website is Drupal. My question is if they manage the information via the Drupal database? Obviously, the users are handled by Drupal, but are the tags on the satellite images that the users place also handled by Drupal and the Flash is only for the front-end?
My guess is that are using the re-captcha system where people are presented with two words. One word is know which is what the person needs to enter and the other word was taken from a photocopy of an old book that re-captcha is digitalizing. If several people agree on the spelling of the unknown word it is then thought be known. Perhaps, National Geographic is doing the same thing. If a number of people mark a satellite image with ancient ruins they might send a team out to actually visit the place.
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As far as the maps on that
As far as the maps on that site, nope, not Drupal. The backend is hitting this sparsely documented API (surprising that it's documented at all). That server's running PHP 5.2 but it's very unlikely that it's Drupal (no reason for Drupal, the URLs don't look like it, none of the pages on that server are running Drupal, the OAuth impl isn't Drupal's).
As far as the Flash, not all that up to speed on introspecting that, but it's probably Modest Maps or similar.
The source clearly has
The source clearly has Drupal's settings JS, and http://exploration.nationalgeographic.com/mongolia/CHANGELOG.txt says it's running Drupal 6.17. So yeah... it's a Drupal site.
However, you're right that they don't appear to be using any community modules for the mapping.
Yes: the wrapper is Drupal,
Yes: the wrapper is Drupal, as I stated. The maps, however, are embeds, based on another system and an API that isn't built on Drupal. It's not that they aren't using community modules for Drupal mapping: they aren't using Drupal for mapping.
although the aggregated css
although the aggregated css file urls have the structure sites/default/files...
The content management site
The content management site is Drupal - there's no doubt about that. No data management or geo stuff is done in Drupal.