thanks and development suggestions

[jcothran]

Hi all,

Thanks much for the work on the Marco site and github release, we've
been getting pinged on to do something the same or similar in our
region and found it very helpful having the github and madrona
appliance to work with in getting a copy version going internally(can
make some suggestions later on the documentation where we had to
puzzle through things a bit).

Hoping to be able to contribute back to this project as we get more
familiar with the general framework and madrona/marco specific
technical bits, but wanted to give a head's up to parts we'd like to
develop or see developed within this project framework and in context
to some of the existing IOOS RA(Regional Association) map viewers and
products referenced at http://www.ioos.gov/data/welcome.html .

Our own mapping websites for in-situ http://secoora.org/maps and
models http://secoora.org/maps/interactivemodelmap.php which I think
we'd like to move into the madrona/marco framework could be done, but
currently unsure how to convert some features relating to how we
'filter' and present our point in-situ platform pop-ups with the
default on 'real time observations' or perhaps how we might present a
time-series comparison clipboard for various in-situ or model
measurements seen in other viewers such as the Maracoos viewer
http://assets.maracoos.org/ or PacIOOS viewer http://oos.soest.hawaii.edu/pacioos/voyager/
both of which use 'flot' http://people.iola.dk/olau/flot/examples/ for
their graphing library.

For time-series display and comparison tools I'm unsure whether a
GeoJSON oriented convention like our internal 'ObsJSON' (hourly
changed platform sample feeds at http://neptune.baruch.sc.edu/xenia/feeds/obsjson/all/latest_hours_24/
) would be helpful or say 'flot' might suggest a preferred feed
format.

Other additional common features seem to be right-hand panel for
legend displays and either inclusive or pop-up style layer controls
for tunable layer parameters(pop-up's I'm guessing when controls are
layer-specific or where a large number of controls start making things
cluttered - PacIOOS has layer controls included for example where
Maracoos has pop-ups).

With the map layer listing, we might also be nesting layers several
groups deep (I think the current layers are only one group deep),
tagged, searched and presented by multiple themes/categories.

A map 'save/print pdf' button has also been requested from our users.

Will probably experiment with incorporating ESRI javascript/REST type
elements as well in regards to map controls and geoprocessing tasks.

Anyway, these are some of the common products and features we'll be
working to incorporate or notice where others might be working
similarly. Glad to talk more by phone as interested.

Thanks
Jeremy

[Tim Welch]

Good to hear from you Jeremy.  We appreciate the kind words and any feedback you have to share.  I'll take an initial shot at replying to some of the things in your email.  A good next step to greasing the wheels of collaboration would be to create a few tickets (issues) in GitHub for the features you'd like to see.  Then we can start a discussion on each ticket and let things run their course.  If there's particular errors or bugs you are seeing you are welcome to submit those as well as you run across them.

Good questions.  Some thoughtful UI design and element placement is certainly called for, and that is probably a project specific thing that depends on your audience.  A number of the things you mention look to be standalone elements and could translate over pretty nicely and could either be a popup, bottom panel or right panel.  The guys might have some thoughts.  We have a standing monthly dev call scheduled with our sister organization Ecotrust Canada on November 28th at 10am PST.  Maybe we can turn it into a madrona dev call and do some brainstorming, show and tell, etc.  Would you be interested in joining?

 

With the map layer listing, we might also be nesting layers several
groups deep (I think the current layers are only one group deep),
tagged, searched and presented by multiple themes/categories.

Yes, a tree view is good for arbitrary structures although can be confusing for people to navigate.  That's something that was developed for our KML-driven 3D work a la KMLTree (http://code.google.com/p/kmltree/) but haven't worked into a 2D Madrona project yet.  Maybe one of the guys can comment on what our approach would be today.  

 

A map 'save/print pdf' button has also been requested from our users.

Yes, save/print as image and pdf is something we'll be releasing as soon as this week for the MARCO Marine Planner.  We took an interesting shortcut approach using Webshot (http://code.google.com/p/webshot/), creating a server-side print service that fires up a headless webkit browser, renders the map and outputs an image.  Legends are included.  Stay tuned for that, still working out the bugs.  The code is here: https://github.com/Ecotrust/marco-portal/tree/next-release/printing

 

Will probably experiment with incorporating ESRI javascript/REST type
elements as well in regards to map controls and geoprocessing tasks.

That'll be interesting to see.  We're interested in being able to use the ArcGIS Server REST API either directly or through their Javascript API to discover and populate the data layer widget for example and configure the map layers automatically.  We're also interested in being able to integrate published geoprocesses for analysis of user-created shapes and scenarios.  This is something we've already done with other analytical tools (PostGIS, Grass, Marxan, etc.) and have a pretty nice abstraction in place for (http://ecotrust.github.com/madrona/docs/analysistools.html)

 

Anyway, these are some of the common products and features we'll be
working to incorporate or notice where others might be working
similarly.  Glad to talk more by phone as interested.

That's great.  Let me know about the call and feel free to keep using the list for discussion.

 

Thanks
Jeremy