I am currently busy with the last big chunk of work for the first release of Maps and Semantic Maps, which is Open Layers integration. I’ll post about this as soon as I got more concrete results.
The integration of Open Layers is proving, as expected, to be more challenging then with the other mapping services. On the other hand, the ‘infrastructure’ of the extensions themselves are completely ready to handle it, and I’ve now got a really good idea of how the mapping stuff works, so this should not take up to much time. I’m hoping to get all the Open Layers work, both semantic and non-semantic, done in 2 weeks, so I can release a first version of both extensions.
So what will be in the extensions for the first release? I’ll complete the wiki documentation articles that will answer this question before the first release, but here you already have a small list:
- Mapping services: Google Maps (+ Google Earth), Yahoo! Maps, Open Layers (only 1 marker layer per map)
- Parser functions: display_point, display_address, geocode, geocodelat, geocodelon (these functions will work for every mapping service)
- Semantic aggregation of coordinates for each mapping service
- Semantic Forms input with Google Maps
After discussing with Yaron, we came up with a few things that could be added after the initial release. We are hoping to get some feedback about wanted functionality so we can prioritize the work.
- KML support for Google Earth and Open Layers
- Multiple custom (wiki defined) Overlays for Open Layers
- Display_route parser function, which will accept 2 points/locations and auto generate a route
- Add Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) as a mapping service
- Add tag syntaxis for Open Layers, to simplify the structure of the parameters in wiki code
Both list only contain the mayor features, and therefore are not complete.
Now it’s back to work for me 🙂