[daisy] A geo-enabled Daisy ?

[Luca Morandini]

Folks,

I was ruminating about using Daisy for a project of mine... you
guessed it right, it is about maps. No, not Google Maps (yes, there's
something else beside GMaps in the GIS world).

Therefore, I came up with this idea, which I'd like to expose to you
in order to elicit some comments.

Adding maps to Daisy:
1) Create a "map" part type: just a simple XML fragment containing
parameters values about map territorial extension, GIS application
URL,, layers to be displayed and so on.
2) The "map" part will be expanded into an iframe when rendering the
document. Why the iframe ? I'm glad you asked: since the map is
supposed to contain some navigation widgets and let the user zoom
in/out and pan, it would be annoying to reload the complete page,
moreover, one can thus decouple the CMS-published web-site from the
GIS application.
3)  The iframe will contain an image (the map), with some overlaid
symbols, each with a link to a specific CMS page (which may contain a
map as well).

Now, it would be nice doing the opposite as well: to geo-reference
maps in Daisy:
1) A page could be linked to a geographic feature (for the time being,
just a point) by specifying its coordinates, which would be stored,
via a "location" part type into a geometric field of the relevant
MySQL table. This calls for the ability to link a part type to a
particular column type in the database (by the way the column type is
DBMS-specific).
2) The DBMS table containing the location "location" part will be used
by a GIS to display the positions of Daisy pages on a map.

If this sounds too complicated, a web-service interface to edit
geographic data could be used, hence dispensing with the DBMS
details... at the cost of adding a table that it outside the realm of
the repository.

The distant future:
1) It would be nice have a GUI for selecting the area to display on a
map, choose the layers to be drawn, navigation widgets to show, etc.
2) It would be even nicer to geo-reference a page by visually
selecting a point  from a map or, even, by entering an address or a
geographic feature name.
3) Linking lines or polygons to pages (not just points).

Regards,

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   Luca Morandini
www.lucamorandini.it
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