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Abstract: 

This presentation will include an overview of the emerging Geospatial web, and the technologies, standards and communities that are driving it. We'll look at how Google Maps fall short and how to go beyond its basic approach to mapping on the web. We'll cover where Drupal fits in, ways to incorporate other mapping tools and data into your projects. Specifically, what modules extend Drupal, enable it to leverage existing tools and how to use these to do new and interesting things.

Presenters: 

Jeff Miccolis
Andrew Turner

Agenda

The standard solution for adding maps on most Drupal sites is Google maps, but by using them you give up control over your workflow, design, and data. Leveraging existing open source tools and data you can recover that control, and make tools that are better focused, more usable, more accessible and better looking.

There is a set of evolving GeoWeb technologies, communities using geospatial technology, and businesses that are growing in the various spaces of geodata. We'll look at what these technologies are, who is developing them, how they can be useful for your project and how to get involved.

The Drupal community has developed a powerful set of tools to aggregate, author and manage content. Tapping into the larger Geospatial online toolset is often just a matter of adding some glue to existing Drupal projects. We'll look at example of projects and sites that are doing this, what Drupal modules exist already, and what still need to be written.

Goals

You should get a good understanding of the geospatial communities, tools, and data that are available, how you can leverage those tools in a Drupal application and how you can become involved in making them even better.

Resources

Attendees may be interested to look at examples of the opensource tools and data that are available as well as an example of mapping with Drupal site without Google Maps.

Speakers

Andrew Turner

Andrew is CTO of FortiusOne, creators of GeoCommons, and is developing open-standards and tools to make it easy for people to create customized maps using complex geospatial tools. He also actively participates in the open-source geo and data communities including the standardization of KML and GeoRSS. Andrew wrote the O'Reilly short cut Introduction to Neogeography and Where 2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web business report in Fall 2008. He is also published in MacTech and Make magazine on his home-automation hacking. Andrew blog is HighEarthOrbit.

Jeff Miccolis

Jeff is a senior developer at Development Seed. He’s an experienced Drupal developer with more than 50 websites under his belt. He’s co-created several innovative Drupal modules such as Spaces and Context and is currently work to improve Drupal as a Geospatial platform with projects like Nice Map and Parser KML.

5 Comments
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notes from an audience member
http://interdependentweb.com/DrupalCon/2009/DrupalAndTheGeospacialWeb
comments welcome

I really enjoyed this session! Thank you!

As we are in development of a web portal that's living from global incidents, we already looked how we can do this. I'm really curious which options are available with opensource geoinformation systems, instead of using google maps/earth.

Good luck with this. Look forward to seeing you again Andrew, and hearing what the two of you are suggesting. I've done a lot of work using the gmap module in Drupal for http://www.opengreenmap.org and am interested to see what can be done with open source mapping in Drupal.