[daisy] A geo-enabled Daisy ?

[Luca Morandini]

On 5/2/07, Bruno Dumon <bruno at outerthought.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 03:03 -0400, Luca Morandini wrote:
> > 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)?

Yes, a field type would be more appropriate.... though it would have
to be converted from text (in the form) to binary (in the table).


> And the reason for having such a specific field type is probably [only]
> to enable special searches?

Not only: my rationale is producing geographic content for maps not
necessarily served by Daisy. Imagine adding a geo-enabled Daisy
document for every airport, you could then embed such airports
location as background information in a map served by a different
system as long as the Daisy column containing location information is
accessible and stored according to a given binary format ("Well Known
Binary" in OpenGIS -speak).


> 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.

It would be nice indeed, but I am a step before that: I would like to
add a field type of a given, DBMS dependent, column type and store in
it the content of a couple of text field taken from the form. I
suppose it could be done, but I'd like to have some hints on how to
get there.

Best regards,

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   Luca Morandini
www.lucamorandini.it
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