MapRoom - a multi-user spatial data management tool
Saturday, March 4, 2006 at 12:33AM Hey all. So Brent and I have continued thinking about this whole spatial data management system we've all been discussing. Here are two mock-ups of what we think such a site might look lile. These are, of course, super rough right now, lacking some features and design considerations our first draft will have, but we'd love to get people's comments and thoughts from the get go. Main Page First page you see, with a simple search bar and a Google map to limit your search spatially. You'll be searching on tags and metadata we derive from the files initially, maybe other sources of metadata later. The Categories tab will be an alternate, categorical view of the data, based on hierarchical categories like data type, source, theme, etc.
Dataset View This is the view of a single piece of data, or file. Shows all the metadata, tags organized by popularity (or most searched on?), and big bright download button. Oh and imagine an "Add a tag" text box there beneath the tags. WMS/WFS/WCS functionality is sort of something we might like later on down the road, but not immediately.
The upload view will look very similar. Either you're remote user and you upload a file or you're an admin and you tell the application that you've put some data you'd like to add in a designated holding directory. The app will read the file, try to figure out as much of the metadata as possible, and then the uploader will have to fill in the required fields that the app can't figure out. It'll look a lot like the dataset view, except those fields will be editable.
Reader Comments (5)
Yay, comments!
1) Dang and blast! I liked that name. My other idea was MapDrawer, but it's so hard to say. Hm, the Dave Shaarimatic?
2) Thanks. Hadn't thought about how to represent data with an extent containing the current view extent. I'd say either ignore them or have a bit of text at the bottom saying "This extent within X larger datasets" and have that link to scale that contains those datasets. Any other ideas?
3) Yeah, that's probably more SRS data than people really want to know. How about we hide the details in a div and a little "show more" link that makes it visible?
4) Versioning is something we definitely have our eyes on, but in our first step out of vaporware we're just focusing on representing single datasets.