blog.notmyidea.org/content/dev/carto-forms.rst

Carto-forms
###########

:slug: carto-forms
:date: 30-03-2012
:author: Alexis Métaireau, Mathieu Leplatre
:tags: GIS, forms
:lang: en
:status: draft

We have a plan. A "fucking good" one.

A bunch of friends asked me twice for quite the same thing: a webpage with a
form, tied to a map generation with some information filtering. They didn't
explicitly ask that but that's the gist of it.

This idea has been stuck in my head since then and I even think that we can
come out with something a little bit more flexible and useful. I've named it
*carto-forms* for now, but that's only the "codename".

To put it shortly: what if we had a way to build forms, ala google forms, but
with geographic information in them?

If you don't know google forms, it means having an user-friendly way to build
forms and to use them to gather information from different users.

In my opinion, Google forms is missing two important things: first, it's not
open-source, so it's not possible to hack it or even to run it on your own
server.  Second, it doesn't really know how to deal with geographic data, and
there is no way to filter the information more than in a spreadsheet.

I knew that `Mathieu`_ and some folks at `Makina Corpus`_  would be interested
in this, so I started a discussion with him on IRC and we refined the details
of the project and its objectives.

Some use cases
==============

I can see some use cases for this. The first one is a collaborative map, with
facet filtering. Let's draw a potential user flow:

* An "administrator" goes to the website and creates a form to list all the
  alternative-related events. He creates the following fields:
  
  * Name: a plain text field containing the name of the event.

  * Category: the category of the event. Can be a finite list.

  * Location: The location of the event. It could be provided by selecting a
    point on a map or by typing an address.

  * Date: the date of the event (a datepicker could do the trick)

  Each field in the form has semantic information associated with it (yes/no,
  multiple selection, date-time, geocoding carto, carto selection etc)

* Once finished, the form is generated and the user gets an url (say
  http://forms.notmyidea.org/alternatives) for it.

* REST APIs allow third parties to get the form description and to
  push/edit/get information from there.

* He can communicate the address in any way he wants to his community so they
  can go to the page and add information to it.

* Then, it is possible to filter the results per location / date or category.
  This can be done via API calls (useful for third parties) or via a nice
  interface in the browser.

So, as you may have noticed, this would allow us to create interactive maps really
easily. It's almost just a matter of some clicks to the users. If we also come
up with a nice Web API for this, we could do server-side validation and build
even phone applications easily.

To push the cursor a bit further, if we can come with a cool description format
for the forms, we could even build the forms dynamically on different platforms,
with generic clients.

Here are some other examples of where *carto-forms* could be useful:

Designing dedicated forms for OSM mobile apps
---------------------------------------------

1. For a mapping party, we choose a specific topic to map and design the form
   (list of fields (i.e. tags) to be filled + description + type of the
   information)
2. In situ, users fill the form fields with what they see. Geo fields can be
   prepopulated using device geolocation
3. At the end of the day, we can see a map with all user contributions using
   this particular form. 
4. A script can import the resulting dataset and publish/merge with Open Street
   Map

Example uses for this include recycling spots, accessible spots (wheelchairs,
etc.), map advertisement boards (most cities do not track them!)…

Simple GIS storage backend
--------------------------

Let's say you are a mobile developer, you don't want to bother with PostGIS
nor write a custom and insecure code to insert and retrieve your GIS data! You
need carto-forms! A simple API helps you design your models/forms and the
same API allows you to CRUD and query your data. Thus, you only need to focus
on your application, not on how GIS data will be handled.  Distinguish storage
from widgets.

Besides, if you are a django / plomino / drupal/... maintainer : you
can develop a module to "plug" your UI to carto-forms! That's how you will
expose carto forms to your backoffice users (ex: drupal admin UI, django
adminsite). Likewise, you can write widgets that consume datasets in frontend
views (using any webmapping js library)

Visualization tool
------------------

I can explore my dataset content using filters related to each form field.
Faceting can be an idea in order to ease filtering. A map shows the resulting
features set, and raw data can be downloaded (geojson, xml). Ideally, I would
like to obtain a filtered dataset using a Web API.

What's out in the wild already?
===============================

Of course, there is google forms, which allows you to do these kind of things,
but it's closed and not exactly what we are describing here.

We've discovered the interesting https://webform.com/ which allows one to create
forms with a nice drag-n-drop flow. I would love to reproduce something similar
for the user experience. However, the project doesn't handle APIs and
geolocation information.

So… Let's get it real!
======================

As you may have understood, this isn't a really complicated problem. We have
been sometimes chatting about that with Mathieu about what we would need and
how we could achieve this.

We can probably come with an elegant solution without too much pain. Mathieu is
used to work with GIS systems (which is really cool because I'm not at all) and
knows his subject, so that's an opportunity to learn ;-)

We will be at `Djangocong`_ on April 14 and 15 and will probably have
a brainstorming session and a sprint on this, so if you are around and want to
help us, or just to discuss, feel free to join!

We don't know yet if we will be using django for this or something else. We
have been thinking about couchdb, couchapps and geocouch but nothing is written
in stone yet. Comments and proposals are welcome!

Here is the etherpad document we worked on so far:
http://framapad.org/carto-forms. Don't hesitate to add your thoughts and edit
it, that's what it's made for!

Thanks to `Arnaud`_ and `Fuzzmz`_ for proof-reading and typo fixing.

.. _Djangocong:  http://rencontres.django-fr.org
.. _Mathieu: http://blog.mathieu-leplatre.info/
.. _Arnaud: http://sneakernet.fr/
.. _Fuzzmz: http://qwerty.fuzz.me.uk/
.. _Makina Corpus: http://makina-corpus.com