PostGIS in Drupal

Posted by mfredrickson on March 18, 2007 at 7:44pm

Hello,

I've may have some time available in the next few months to devote to upgrading Drupal's GIS abilities. One area where I'd like to concentrate is exposing PostGIS data and functionality. In a nutshell, PostGIS allows storing arbitrary geometries (points, lines, polygons, multipolygons and combinations of those types) in database columns.

I'm in the process of writing a quick project proposal, and I wanted to see if anyone knew of existing work to pair Drupal with PostGIS. I would probably start by writing a CCK module to act as the Drupal <-> PostGIS bridge. Hopefully, since PostGIS is OGC based, I could keep it generic enough to later support MySQL spatial extensions or other OGC compliant database stores.

In addition to the db layer stuff, I'd like to work on views integration (for more powerful spatial queries) and a UI for entering data that is better than just plopping in WKT. Suggestions or prior work on this front would be most appreciated.

Please feel free to request features or specific behaviors. We'll see what I have time to complete.

Cheers,
-Mark

Comments

microformats

Posted by rconstantine on March 22, 2007 at 8:07pm

Could this work integrate the microformat geo? See here for info: http://microformats.org/wiki/geo. I will soon be turning to working on a mapping module for neighborhoods. Could your proposed module do this? If so, I'm willing to work on it with you. I'll take a look at the PostGIS link.

As for microformats in general, I think that most of them would be good candidates for CCK modules.

Related microformats to geo are adr (http://microformats.org/wiki/adr) which is for locations (by address?) if you don't know the name, or hcards (http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard) if you do know the name of the locations since adr is a child(?) of hcard.