An (quick) update of the state of geospatial integration with Drupal

This is so not the first post of this type, and will not be the last. Please note that this was written quickly, and I may have left something out from our discussion, or possibly been inaccurate, so please feel free to correct or add. This topic is definitely owed a more complete post, but it will have to be post DrupalCon.

Yesterday, at DrupalCon Copenhagen, we had a BoF on Geo-Goodness and Drupal where we discussed what is going on in this space, what things could/should happen, and what can be done to make Drupal the Drupal GeoCMS or something close.

Overall, the discussion was very ad-hoc, just trying to get stories of experience people had using modules, and picking modules, and what that means for the developers.

What we decided on are the following:

Documentation

There will be a documentation sprint for the following things tomorrow at the Code Sprint (Fri 27 Aug 2010, Copenhagen). I will be around to help direct people, but have some prior engagements for coding.

• Analysis of the module space for geo-related projects. What is out there? What does what? What works with what? what is the status of the projects? etc. I have agrede to start a wiki page for this, but will need a lot of collaboration to create a full picture.
• Recipes, Use Cases, Case Studies. More example based documentation, as most users can not think in the theoretical and find practical examples better learning tools.

The Stack

The Drupal Geospatial stack probably involves the following parts. There could and should be competing modules in most of these spaces, but they should be able to be switched out easily.

• Data storage
• Collection/Input
• Display

Data formats

A common data format of geospatial data to pass around Drupal would probably be beneficial. Allie has brought this up before, but no action from the community was taken on it. My suggestion was for Geo module to define this and it can be refined moving forward, if necessary.