Geo Module

The Geo Module looks like a great way to have full GIS support within drupal.

The geo module is the next generation geo-spatial module for Drupal. Like location, it provides storage for points, but it also supports the full range of OpenGIS Simple Features, such as lines and polygons. Geo takes advantage of spatially enabled databases (PostGIS and MySQL Spatial) for native storage, which leads to faster, more informational queries.

Geo is currently is early development, but much of the power of the system is very apparent. Feel free to download the code from CVS, but beware that support will be very limited.

Glastonbury!

Here’s a test post from my phone at glastonbury. So far the pain has stayed away and not too much mud, but i’m sure this will all change.

iPhylo: Google Earth phylogenies

Rod Page has extended some cool work and made a nice tree viewable in GoogleEarth. Take a look at the picture below. And he may well add this as a facility in his amazing TreeViewX – bump. Rod, where’s the KML file (or am I missing something?) – I wanted to see if this would work in Google maps as they now support loading KML files.

iPhylo: Google Earth phylogenies
Now, for something completely different. I’ve been playing with Google Earth as a phylogeny viewer, inspired by Bill Piel’s efforts, the cool avian flu visualisation Janies et al. published in Systematic Biology (doi:10.1080/10635150701266848), and David Kidd’s work.

Google Maps in Drupal for specimens

Thanks to Vince for his recent post on Google Maps Mashups. Does enabling cache speed up page loading for this? Or is it the javascript? – I had that problem when trying to overlay shapefiles onto google maps. The “proper” way to do this is to have a map server only serving up the points that are visible from a particular zoom and doing the clustering itself (and drupal doesn’t have this – yet).

Good to see CCK being useful. I read yesterday that Drupal 6 is going to have a proper database API which will perform all of the CRUD actions for you. This is going to be called the Schema API. Should be extremely useful for doing DB related stuff (you don’t have to type CREATE TABLE bunkum;
INSERT INTO bunkum;..... – you just tell your schema to add a record or data type or data structure.