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71 lines
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ReStructuredText
71 lines
3 KiB
ReStructuredText
Carto-forms
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###########
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:date: 30-03-2012
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:author: Alexis Métaireau, Mathieu Leplatre
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:tags: GIS, forms
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The idea
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========
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This idea is walking in my head since some time and I've been talking with a
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bunch of people about it in the last few months. to put it shortly: what if we
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had a way to build forms, ala google forms, but with geographic informations in
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them?
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If you don't know google forms, it means having an user-friendly way to build
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forms, for the users. The form can then be used to submit data to a server,
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which will do something with it.
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Google forms is missing two important things: first, it's not open-source, so
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it's not possible to hack it, or even to run it on your server. Second, it
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doesn't *really* know how to deal with geographic data.
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The use case
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============
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I can see many use cases for this. The first one is a collaborative map, with
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facet filtering. Let's draw the user flow here:
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* An "administrator" goes to the website and create a form to list all the bear
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hugging events in the world. He creates the following fields:
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* Name: a plain text field containing the name of the event.
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* Category: the category of the event. Can be a finite list (only brown
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bears, polar bears, female bears)
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* Location: The location of the event. It could be provided by selecting a
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point on a map or by typing an address.
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* Date: the date of the event (a datepicker could do the trick)
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* Once finished, he gets an url (says http://forms.notmyidea.org/bearhugging)
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* He can communicate the address by the means he wants to his community and they
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can go to the page and fill it.
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So, as you may have notice, It would allow us to create interactive maps really
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easily, just a matter of some clicks for the users. and if we also think about
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a nice Web API for this, we could do server-side validation and built even
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phone applications easily. To push the cursor a bit further, if we can come
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with a cool description format for the data, we could even build the forms
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dynamically on different platforms, with a generic client.
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Well, right, this is me dreaming.
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Let's get it real
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=================
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As you may have understood, this isn't a really complicated problem. I've
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started an etherpad document and we've been chatting about that with `Mathieu`_
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some times. I think we can come with an elegant solution without too much
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pain. Mathieu is used to work with GIS systems (which is really cool because
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I'm not at all) and knows his subject, so that's an opportunity to learn ;-)
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We will be at `Djangocong`_ on april 14 and 15 and we will probably have
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a brainstorming session and a sprint on this, so if you want to help us, or
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just to discuss, feel free to join!
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We don't know yet if we will be using django for this or something else. We
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have been thinking about couchdb, couchapps and geocouch but nothing is written
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in stone yet. Comments and propositions are welcome!
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.. _Djangocong: http://rencontres.django-fr.org
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.. _Mathieu: http://blog.mathieu-leplatre.info/
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