Thursday 19 January 2006 5:28:12 am
The United Nations Association of Norway (UNA Norway) would like to develop a spatial extension to eZ publish. We are looking for partners and good ideas of how this can be achieved. The goal is to get GIS (Geographic Information Systems) capabilities directly within eZ publish. It could be a new spatial datatype that store points, lines and polygons.
Part of the functionality we would like to see:
- Possibility to show automatic generated (and interactive) maps within an article/XML block. - Possibility to specify geographic features in the admin interface. A user could click on an map to show where she lives, - and the coordinates are saved in an spatial database. UNA Norway already have a tool, Globalis, where we want to use this functionality: http://www.globalis.no So far this site is implemented using two web servers, one running Apache and eZ publish and the other running Internet Information Server and ArcIMS. The site is merged by using iframe and XML. We would like the next version of Globalis to be on one server and rely totally on open source technologies. <b>SUGGESTED TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM</b>
<b>Web mapping server</b>
UMN MapServer is a popular open source development environment for building spatially-enabled internet applications.
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu
http://mapserverfoundation.org eZ publish Spatial Extension could be the bridge between eZ publish and UMN MapServer.
<b>Spatial databases</b> None of the databases eZ publish can access have native support for spatial data. But it is possible to extend the databases to get this functionality:
PostgreSQL - PostGIS: http://postgis.refractions.net
MySQL - MySQL Spatial Extension Oracle - Oracle Spatial: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/spatial/ To make the eZ publish Spatial Extension independent of one database we should use the SFSQL specification
OpenGIS Simple Features Specification (SFSQL) is <i>an extension to the relational Structured Query Language standard that defines how Geographic spatial queries can be supported in relational databases. It defines such aggregate constructs as extent, collect and spatial functions such as distance, contains, overlaps.</i> http://www.opengeospatial.org/docs/99-049.pdf PostGIS has one of the most robust implementations of this specification. MySQL Spatial Extension implements a subset of the specification. I’m not sure how compatible Orcale Spatial is, but Oracle Corporation was one of the companies submitting the specification.
<b>Integration</b> To make an integration between eZ publish and MapServer we could use the libraries PHP MapScript and eZ components.
<i>The PHP MapScript module is a PHP dynamically loadable module that makes MapServer 's MapScript functions and classes available in a PHP environment.</i> http://www.maptools.org/php_mapscript/
<i>eZ components is an enterprise ready general purpose PHP platform. As a collection of high quality independent building blocks for PHP application development eZ components will both speed up development and reduce risks.</i> http://ez.no/products/ez_components I’m not sure if the eZ Database component can be used with spatial queries.
<b>Web Mapping</b> To get interactive map functionality within eZ publish it might be sufficient with PHP MapScript, but we could extend the functionality with ka-Map or Chameleon (I have limited knowledge of these tools so far):
<i>ka-Map is an Open Source package that provides a javascript API for developing highly interactive web-mapping interfaces. It has been developed to work with MapServer, but can be easily integrated with other software packages.</i> http://ka-map.maptools.org/
<i>Chameleon is a highly customizable and adaptable environment for deploying and managing Web mapping applications. </i> http://chameleon.maptools.org Look at http://www.maptools.org for other tools. <b>TIME SCHEDULE</b> I would like to wait for eZ publish 4 before we start developing this extension. That also gives us time to do some research about the possibilities of web mapping.
Spring 2006: Doing research and making a specification of eZ publish spatial extension Autumn 2006: Development of eZ publish spatial extension. We have some funding, but our resources are limited.
<b>Recommended reading:</b>
<i>“Web Mapping Illustrated. Using Open Source GIS Toolkits”</i> by Tyler Mitchell http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping/
http://blog.thematicmapping.org
http://www.globalis.no
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