Integrating GIS & Plone

Using ZCO and PrimaGIS

by Josh Livni
PowerPoint Presentation: PrimaGIS: Intro slides

Unfortunately, these notes don't do justice to Josh's presentation as much of this talk was filled with visual examples. 

Intro

• Coming at this from a GIS perspective
• Impressed with power/flexibility of Plone
• Catographic Objects for Zope

Overview

• Components of GIS
• Finding GIS Data
• Displaying your Data (web)
• GIS in Plone
• Data and ZCO
• Displaying w/ PrimaGIS

GIS in three parts

• Data Collection - Needs to be GIS recognizable format
  
• Analysis
  
• Display - With the web, user can interact.  More challenging for designer.
  

Data Collection

• GIS Data.  Common formats:
• Shape files
• Rasters
• Database
• WMS/WFS - Protocols allowing the pulling of a small subset of data from a large set of data

GIS on the Web

• Google maps - nice interface, several layers, powerful servers, lots of bandwidth, public API, limited amount of points, limited amount of layers
• Google Earth
• MapServer - rendering engine for PrimaGIS, upload GPS data there, print PDFs, upload GPS data, lots of developers, stable, comes in a lot of flavors, pre-built widgets
  
• Plone & PrimaGIS
• Created a simple "job" archetype - added spatial coordinate fields to the schema
• Objects that are x, y coded can show up automatically on the map, clickable directly to the object
• Remembers views, layers that are on throughout entire session

What is Mapserver?

PCL? ZCO? PrimaGIS?

• PCL - Python Cartographic Library
• Cartographic Objects for Zope
• PrimaGIS - collaborative web mapping application for Plone, site admins can create ZCO layers, etc.
  

Building the actual map in demo

• PrimaGIS comes with a demo map, can run create map with a Python script
  

• Key to all data is ZCO, allows you to build a layer
• Rawdata directory - several shape files, raster files, data store --> need to choose raster, datastore, etc., demo of WA state counties data downloaded from state website
  
• Symbolize data - can select colors and design
  

Sources for GIS data

• ESRI - lots of basic data in the U.S. in shape format
  
• Search for King County + GIS data
  
• For WMS/WFS - slower due to download - Whirlwind, 100s of WMS servers, ESRI has public WMS servers, U.S.G.S.
• DNR - From a forestry perspective