Geotagging content

[Tama Easton]

I'm currently planning a new website for the Tasman District Council.
When reviewing the internal search analytics I couldn't help noticing
the almost all of the popular search terms are locations. That is
visitors who use the internal search function are most interested to
what is happening in their area (Tasman goes from the edge of Nelson,
to Golden Bay, to Murchison, to Nelson Lakes so is quite large.)

Looking into the future (as well as one can) I reckon that the major
changes with how users access in the internet will be coming from
mobile devices and geolocation. We're already seeing a bit of this
(Googling from my Nokia is location relevant) and it can only grow as
we move away from desktops.

So I'm having a think about how to geotag content and was wondering if
anyone else has gone down this path. At the simplest level crude
geotags could be added to the metadata field but this would be clunky.
To take this a step further on adding geotags as separate metadata to
content should be quite workable and easy to integrate into search
functionality (not to mention Google Maps etc.)

Has anyone already thought about this/ had a crack at it?

Cheers
Tama

[Sam Minnee]

Hi Tama,

We have an experimental gis module that provides GeoPoints and
GeoPolygons as native types. This could be a useful starting point?

There is also the Google Map Selection Field module, which could be
hooked into SilverStripe pages in Page::getCMSFields()
http://www.silverstripe.org/google-map-selection-field-module/

You could potentially customise a search system to have a "Search for
pages within [50KM_____|V]" option. Integrating this geospatial
search with the rest of the search features might be a little tricky
(particularly if you're using a 3rd party search such as sphinx) but
not impossible.

[Tama Easton]

Hi Sam

The GIS module sounds very interesting. As you can imagine the Council
deals in a lot of spatial data so the more geo-friendly I can make the
site the better. Is there a SVN tree for this?

I was thinking about including the advanced search by location; but
also working out a way that if (for example) the user types "motueka"
into the search box that is recognised as a location and the option of
"results within 20km of Motueka" is given (or similar). I'm under no
illusion that the mighty Google has raised the expectation bar for how
users think search should work and am a bit cynic of how many people
use advanced options. Damn them and bless them (Google and users)

Cheers
Tama

On Jan 28, 12:06 pm, Sam Minnee <sam.min...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Tama,
>
> We have an experimental gis module that provides GeoPoints and
> GeoPolygons as native types.  This could be a useful starting point?
>
> There is also the Google Map Selection Field module, which could be

> hooked into SilverStripe pages in Page::getCMSFields()http://www.silverstripe.org/google-map-selection-field-module/

[Toby Champion]

You'll probably want to look at what GeoDjango adds to Django:
http://geodjango.org/docs/tutorial.html#introduction

Toby

> On Jan 28, 11:39 am, Tama Easton <tama.eas...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm currently planning a new website for the Tasman District Council.
>> When reviewing the internal search analytics I couldn't help noticing
>> the almost all of the popular search terms are locations. That is
>> visitors who use the internal search function are most interested to
>> what is happening in their area (Tasman goes from the edge of Nelson,
>> to Golden Bay, to Murchison, to Nelson Lakes so is quite large.)
>>
>> Looking into the future (as well as one can) I reckon that the major
>> changes with how users access in the internet will be coming from
>> mobile devices and geolocation. We're already seeing a bit of this
>> (Googling from my Nokia is location relevant) and it can only grow as
>> we move away from desktops.
>>
>> So I'm having a think about how to geotag content and was wondering if
>> anyone else has gone down this path. At the simplest level crude
>> geotags could be added to the metadata field but this would be clunky.
>> To take this a step further on adding geotags as separate metadata to
>> content should be quite workable and easy to integrate into search
>> functionality (not to mention Google Maps etc.)
>>
>> Has anyone already thought about this/ had a crack at it?
>>
>> Cheers
>> Tama
>

--
Toby Champion
Poulsbo, Washington, USA

[fb3rasp]

Hi Tama,

A general question: what database do you want to use?

Rainer

On Jan 28, 11:39 am, Tama Easton <tama.eas...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Tama Easton]

Hi Rainer

I'm not quite sure of your question. I was purely thinking of
geotagging in the form of Lat/Long co-ordinates: i.e. -41.341548 /
173.18688 as this slots nicely into GeoRSS and can be easily read/
translated by any GIS tool you want to throw at it.

Cheers
Tama

[Nicolaas Thiemen Francken - Sunny Side Up]

Hey Tama

I really like the idea. I am wondering if you should have a third
field: "zoom level". Some stuff applies to a wide area and other
stuff is very local.

Cheers

Nicolaas

[Tama Easton]

Hi Nicolaas

Very good point. Larger areas could be handled by GeoPolygons which
were mentioned by Sam. This is what a GeoPolgon looks like in GeoRSS:

<gml:Polygon>
<gml:exterior>
<gml:LinearRing>
<gml:posList>
-71.106216 42.366661
-71.105576 42.367104
-71.104378 42.367134
-71.103729 42.366249
-71.098793 42.363331
-71.101028 42.362541
-71.106865 42.366123
-71.106216 42.366661
</gml:posList>
</gml:LinearRing>
</gml:exterior>
</gml:Polygon>

Between GeoPoints and GeoPolygons we should have enough flexibility to
deal with any location or area (on the surface of the Earth of
course!)

Cheers
Tama

On Feb 2, 3:33 pm, Nicolaas Thiemen Francken - Sunny Side Up

[Nicolaas Thiemen Francken - Sunny Side Up]

the problem is how you do the data-entry for a polygon. It is a nice
concept, but it seem impracticable to data-entry (lots of work to
either make an editor OR lots of work looking up all the
coordinates).

Hence a zoom level might be a nice approximation (e.g. street, suburb, town)