As many of you read earlier on this blog, we released Nice Map as a bridge for Drupal to better communicate with WMS servers. Jeff gave a nod to NASA’s free server, which is a great source for beautiful surface imagery and an easy way to test WMS clients. However, the real benefit of mapping with WMS is that you can drop in any WMS-compliant server you like, and Nice Map and other clients will do the legwork of getting beautiful maps on your site. This opens up the possibility for completely custom, beautiful maps like we have on Stumble Safely – maps that can set your site apart from the masses of Google Maps and match the zaniest color schemes. The level of flexibility offered by the WMS protocol and servers is an incredible boon for anyone doing online maps. Here’s one example of a custom map we built with this.

Last Thursday the crew from Development Seed got together to kick back for a night and celebrate what we've accomplished in the last year. We had almost a full team with Ian joining us from Colorado and Jose coming over from Spain, and we were just missing our fabulous interns who were hard at work on their final exams. Needless to say, a feast was had, many bottles of wine were drank, and tequila was ordered for all by Eric. Many thanks to Local 16 for hosting us and to Alex for making us look so good.

Here are Alex's photos from the party.

Say you are a development agency with on-the-ground operations, all of which use their own websites to collect geo rich data. You want to be able to associate this data from your on-the-ground programs with private content that’s on your organization’s main intranet back here in Washington, DC (for instance, staff data). Beyond that, you want to view external data and related private content together on a map. If you think about it, this example boils down to the question, “How do you map and reference external data in an unambiguous fashion?”

We spent the last couple of days pulling together the pieces that were missing to answer this question in Drupal. Here’s a rundown of the approach we took and the modules that we rolled out for it.

The Recipe

The basic architecture we came up with is to aggregate geo rich data (KML or GeoRSS) into an RDF data store and display it with Views and Nice Map. For referencing RDF data from nodes, we used the Relations API. For aggregation, we used FeedAPI with KML Parser and FeedAPI RDF processor.

I’ve had design coming out my ears the past couple weeks while working on the the designs and themes for DrupalCon DC, DC Bikes, Stumble Safely, and the New America Foundation’s recently launched State of State Health. Working around the clock on theming has been a good reminder of how even veteran Drupal themers can use some brushing up on their fundamentals. Inspired in part by this simple sticky, I put together a wallpaper that includes the reminders and diagrams I found myself needing the most.