Building Community Information Systems with Drupal and Open Layers

Building community information systems with Drupal and Open LayersFOSS4G – Sydney Australia
Charles Burnett & Patrick Hayes
Geomemes Research Inc
Victoria BC Canada
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54° 20' 13.72" N 130° 26' 36.93" W
Metlakatla First Nation Village, Prince Rupert, Canada
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/17998472

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FOSS4G4IC<->GOV
All exchanges are contextualized by the cultures that are party to the exchange.
“Prototypes of New Understanding” - Brian Jungen (Swiss/Dunne-za), Vancouver, Canada

Wawa of the BC Context
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Wawa = Chinook Jargon: Kloshe Konaway!, Skookum
INAC: Indian Act 1876, Federal responsibility
Reserves: post gold rush, traders to settlers
First Nation: Indigenous political unit (~203 in BC)
Treaty: BC has a Treaty Commission, some FNs “in treaty”, 2 modern signed, Land/$$/Co-management
Land Claims: negotiate through the courts
“Duty to Consult” and Accomodation
Referrals: BC Gov system for doing consultation
TUS/TEK: Traditional Use Study, -Ecologial Knowledge
EBM: Ecosystem Based Management

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Band Chief Councilor:
“I need CED (“referrals”) reports with summary, maps, analysis, communications highlights.”
School Teacher:
“I need access to the maps and multimedia files to teach our culture.”
Referrals Manager:
“I need to track staff time spent on consultation.”
Fisheries Officer:
“I need a (spatialized) system to record environmental data.”
Teeenager:
“I want to access to some community data, calendars, blogs, job lists and our elections info.”
Cultural Expert:
“I need a better way of doing interviews and for digitizing our TUS/TEK/Arch data.”
GIS techniciam:
“I’m swamped and need help wit hdata entry, but we have no $$ for training.”
CED Staffer:
“I need a better way to track consultation. Paper copies suck!”
54° 20' 13.72" N 130° 26' 36.93" W
Metlakatla First Nation Village, Prince Rupert, Canada

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To change the rules, change the tools
Lee Felsenstein (1945-), computer engineer

CIS: One Basket, Many Views
Cultural / Language
Revitalization
Spatial Data
Storage & Viewing
Community Building / Governance
Drupal + PostGIS
FN Data
Basket
Economic Development & Consultation
(including Referrals Tracking)
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Start with a GIS? Or a CMS?
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Start with a Mapping Application, add CMS-ness
Add tools to add/edit/manage non-geographic information, incl. multimedia
Add tools to manage roles/access/views/communications/...
+ Use Scripting to generate reports
Start with Content Management System (CMS)
Add tools to interactively enter and display geographic information
Add tools to link CMS with spatial databases
+ Use Scripting to generate reports

Content Management System
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A content management system (CMS) is a computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text.
Modular: Core (user management, security)
Contributed Modules(1000s of modules to at data types and funtionality)
E.g. Drupal Open Layers, Geo

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Like Many Others... ...Drupal
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Ubuntu, Canonical
Die Zeit
Die Welt
CNN
Amnesty

International

Greenpeace
NASA
NATO
The United Nations
IBM
Popular Science
Fast Company
America Online
Sun Microsystems
Novell
Yahoo!
Harvard University
Many, many other

universities

Fedex
Nike
Forbes
Warner Bros
20th Century Fox
MacWorld
Adobe
Java.net
RackSpace

Spatial Data
Management
ESRI /
Manifold /
(Quantum)
Desktop
GIS
Drupal + MySQL
Database
Industry
Fills Out
Proposal
CED
(Referrals)
Manager
PostGIS
Database
(via ArcSDE
or ZigGIS)
Community
Member/
Teacher
ESRI/Oracle
Databases
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Drupal
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Drupal Open Layers (DOL)
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Node Type

Field (CCK)
Spatial Field Widget (DOL)

Views

Style (table, list, map)
Which “preset”?
Filters (which nodes?)
Arguements (e.g. URL)

DOL+

Snippets
Data loaders

Themes

Templates
PHP files & CSS files

DOL

Create presets
Set proj, set base layers, set zoom, center, default style, overlay layers

Blocks, Panels, Menus

Structure your layout
Build navigation

http://geomemes.com/openlayers-screencast

Drupal Open Layers: Capabilities
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Create spatial nodes in Drupal (point/lines/polygon) – don’t need code to use the OL API
Can make complex maps, lots of layers
DOL API has “glue” to approximately 30% of OL library
One level up: Snippet – small code to create easy
People sharing Snippets
Upload shapefile (stored in MySQL Spatial or PostGIS),
Drupal doing the db abstraction
Point and click map building and styling
Styling Engine pretty powerful now
Dynamic styles (attributes in Drupal can be used to make styles)
E.g. Taxonomy image for icons, or cck field for line weight

Drupal Open Layers: Next Steps
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We have a solid API and a rapidly growing group of developers. Core Functionality (Drupal/OL glue) ready to be built upon...
DOL 2.0 is accepting new feature requests
http://drupal.org/project/openlayers
Add easier way to upload shapefiles
Expand to WMS/WFS... All data types in Open Layers
Integrate Drupal Chaos Tools module; allows custom bundles of snippets as a ‘feature’ -> module
Improved Styling

CIS: Community Health
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CIS: Language Revitalization
FNs = spoken language cultures
Drupal, Multimedia
Javascript links automatically seeded when a new “term” + MP3 added
...Localization!
...Cross-site API!
...+ Maps!
... education...
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http://maps.fphlcc.ca/

CIS: Advanced File Management
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...DEMO
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Gilakasla – Thank-you!
http://geomemes.com charles@geomemes.com

Demo Functionality
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Add individual TUS sites - (CCK, Related Fields, DOL)
Add/modify many site nodes (Views)
Load Shapefile - (Table Wizard, Geo)
Show different features on the same map -(Views/Roles/Permissions)
Filter maps – (Faceted Search)
WMS/WFS – (DOL Snippets, API calls)
Links to desktop – (Geo, custom PHP)
Reporting – (DOL, Geo, PHP calls to PostGIS)

Community Information System
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1. Add Site
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1. Add Site
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1. Add Site
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2. View Sites
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3. Show diff. features on same map
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Views/Roles/Permissions

4. View Sites, Filter by User
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5. Basic map... ...WMS/WFS
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5. Basic map... ...WMS/WFS...
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