Adding data from other organisations

[korre22]

When I use the local map in my hometown I find lots of good stuff. It would be great if I could add another city´s data, published from WMS/WFS so I can use the same map outside my hometown. There might be local maps but sometimes there isn´t.

How would I find these data? Perhaps searching and adding links from dataportal.se or from a selection of links as a dropdown list in my local Eskilstunakartan.

This would increase interoperability between neighboring towns and it might help in coordinating fights against wildfires, floods and other crises and situations.

Imagine the zombie apocalypse; where should we build a large campfire in a quarry and how do we lead them there? Near the municipality border with shared responsibilities.

[steff-o]

Could you please be more specific regarding what change you propose to Origo?

The map author can of course always add the layers needed for your tasks (finding great quarries). In that case it is a matter of finding good map sources, which is outside the scope of origo development.

If you want the user to be able to add map layers themselves there is the LayerManager plugin: https://github.com/origo-map/layermanager which has the capability of dynamically add layers. Still you would need a good source to add layers from. A general problem with users being able to add their own layers is that it most likely requires some sort of save map feature to be useful, as dynamically added layers will be lost next time map is reloaded.

[Grammostola]

We touched on this briefly during the 'arbetsgruppträff', that the LayerManager is a logical place to start, and to make it more capable / generalize it, so that it can be configured with external services for instance (instead of requiring a csw-backend or something else probably local). This list of external services could be user-supplied as well as preconfigured. Saving a map state with layers added from these would be similar to how layermanager-csw does it. We can discuss it tomorrow at the dev meeting.

[steff-o]

You are encouraged to gather requirements and more specific use cases. Probably it is a good idea to discuss further with the "Arbetsgrupp" and come to a conclusion what would be useful to the origo community.

Some aspects that should be considered:

• What kind of sources should be supported
  • CSW?
  • DCAT?
  • WMS/WFS getCapabilities?
  • Arc Gis server/online?
  • Custom?
    • A custom format would require a server side component that has the capability of scrape the actual sources (e.g. those listed above) and transform to an Origo specific format, pretty much like the existing LayerManager plugin.
    • A custom format server side could be implemented in origo server or up to each organization to provide.
• Which layer types should be supported
  • Vector layer types would probably require some symbol handling.
• Should the user to be able to add sources themselves or should they only be able to add layers from known sources
• Should there be any search capabilities
  • Search on structured metadata?
  • Free text search on unstructured metadata (description)?
  • Plain listing of names?
• Should added layers be persisted for the user somehow?
  • Server side session? Would require a server side component, e.g. Origo-server
  • LocalStorage in browser (pretty much like a cookie)?
  • Part of sharemap's state (user can save a link and reopen map using that link)?

That said, it's not a bad idea at all. I'm all for it but wants to know more about the intended scope and how it would affect Origo.