[daisy] A geo-enabled Daisy ?

[Bruno Dumon]

Hi,

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 03:03 -0400, Luca Morandini wrote:
> 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).
> 
<snip/>
> 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).

I guess you rather mean a location field type (instead of part type)?
And the reason for having such a specific field type is probably [only]
to enable special searches?

One way to look at this is that you need a sort of custom index (just
like there is now the fulltext index), and than preferably also some
corresponding query-possibilities in the Daisy query language.

Maintaining such an index is already possible by either listening to JMS
events (assynchronic) or synchronous repository events. Plugging
extensions into the Daisy query language is not yet possible, though
something we're thinking about. However, unless you want to do more
complex queries, you can probably live without this.

> 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.

Via a custom part editor (see somewhere in the Daisy docs), this should
be no problem as far as Daisy is concerned.

-- 
Bruno Dumon                             http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center
bruno at outerthought.org                          bruno at apache.org