After reading Ronaldos posting and having looked at the wireframes I would like
to make a few comments. Knowing that Ronaldo requested feedbacks by the 1st of
April I hope that my comments still could be relevant for the further work on
Geonode,
Having tried out Geonode I am generally very pleased with the system. It was
introduced to me by Reinier Battenberg at a point where I was planning to
introduce Geoserver to project partners using the OpenGeo Suite. Geonode
provided a further abstraction layer where the more technical sides could be
kept "in the back". So I have now happily started using Geonode in the same
projects. It is in an early phase but Geonode has been very usefull this far.
In a couple of weeks GeoCat will host a one week geoserver/geonode training for
us.
Geonode provides a central part of establishing a spatial data infrastructure.
I am working on two projects where we are hoping that Geonode will be part of a
national Infrastructure. Thanks to everyone making this possible.
In Timor Leste I am helping DNMA (National Directorate for the Environment) to
look at areas where they can coordinate environmental information. We held a
workshop early in March where both current status for managing thematic data
and alternatives for moving forward were discussed. A posting on the workshop
with associated presentations and documents are available (see
www.mindland.com).
In Uganda I am working together with the National Environmental Management
Authority to coordinate environmental information relevant for the current
Petroleum developments in the Albertine graben. This work is done as part of
the Environmental Information Network in Uganda.
In both instances the goal is to establish clearing houses for environmental
information. The information relevant is:
1) Geographical information
Standardized geographical objects (grid squares, administrative objects)
2) Related information
Codelists (species/contact points/assets/etc)
Litterature references
Documents (text/spreadsheets/pdfs/images)
The clearing house should be a system which could pull relevant inforation from
1) and 2). A standardization process is necessary for both information
categories. The geographical information will go well into a system like
Geonode, while the related information should be in a separate database.
>From looking at the wireframes geonode could move in a direction where it
>looks more like a Content Management System (CMS). From my point of view that
>is not the way to go.
For the two mentioned projects we are aiming at integrating maps prepared in
Geonode into a CMS (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or other). So far I have
experimented with Wordpress and I am very happy about how one can integrate
external information into it through embedded objects, rss and a rich ecosystem
of plugins. Geonode competing with a CMS could confuse the excellent parts of
Geonode.
>From my perspective I would like geonode to be better in:
* helping users to do collaborative efforts to make maps which could be
embedded in a CMS.
*having more options for customizing embedded maps
* providing RSS-lists of available maps for listing in a CMS
* helping users in making maps which where attribute data from gaographical
objects presented could be used to point to third party sources of information
(document repositories etc).
*making plugins or code which makes it easier to integrate maps and metadata
from geonode ( geonetwork/geoserver)
Regards,
Ragnvald
