[Imc-alternatives] OpenStreetMap and GeoNames

[ekes]

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Danyl Strype wrote:
> Just wanted to draw your attention to a couple of free culture  
> projects that might be useful to us in geolocating the projects that  
> are being documented on or site. OpenStreetMap is an open equivalant  
> of Google Maps
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/
> 
> GeoNames is a free database of location information:
> http://www.geonames.org/about.html
> 
> All data from both projects is freely available under CreativeCommons  
> licenses (Attribution-Share-Alike for maps, Attribution for GeoNames),  
> and can be integrated into other sites using web services.

The problem with external services is always that of anonymisation.

Geolocation doesn't have to send the users IP address, and does just
send the location that will be public, so timing is possibly the only
issue there. There was a geonames cck module for Drupal, which worked
quite well, pulling up 'did you mean...?' options at the submission
stage too. It's not been updated recently though - and says that the
geonames free service is discontinued? However the core geonames module
has been updated, it would need some work to integrate it into any
location solution though.

Displaying maps is much more of an issue however as you (normally) then
need to force the user to make a connection to another website using
javascript. But using TileCache it's possible to request the maps from
the webserver, store them in TileCache there, and then serve them from
the cache to the user. There is a http://drupal.org/project/nicemap
which will talk to a WMS server, it might work with TileCache. Otherwise
there is also http://drupal.org/project/mappingkit which will again
probably need some integration work but uses http://openlayers.org which
will work a dream with TileCache.

The other issue with Drupal and location is where to put it with the
system. http://drupal.org/project/location is the normal way, it
integrates ok with Google and Yahoo geocoding mainly and works with
http://drupal.org/project/gmap so to do geonames and another map will
need a bit of coding. If the time scale is longer throwing something
behind the new work around http://drupal.org/project/geo is possibly a
better idea.

ekes
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