Mapping With Drupal - Alan Palazzolo [5]
Even if you have geographical data and an audience that can manage a web map interface, you will still have to be able to make decisions around your map to ensure that the map conveys the story you want to tell. If you are not able to complete the goal of the map, through lack of design, not providing enough context, or inability to provide real interaction, it may be best to avoid a map so that your users are not distracted by it, and instead focus on other methods for telling the story.
What Maps to Use
With web mapping, most people do not have the resources to create map tiles themselves, or even to host tiles (for detail on map tiles, see Mapping Terms). Later in the book we will discuss recent developments in open source mapping that have made these things more accessible. But even so, it is likely that you will need to use the map tiles of other map makers, such as Google, Bing, or MapQuest. They are not all the same. There are clear differences in the technical implementation, visual design, and the commercial and legal considerations. But beyond this there are different assumptions made by the maps and satellite imagery.
The following images show the difference in tile sets of road data in Stockholm (Figure 1-4) and the satellite imagery over the Horn of Africa (Figure 1-5). You can see that there are differences in data, design, and filtering.
Figure 1-4. Street tiles over Stockholm from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and OpenStreetMap, as seen at Tile Compare
Figure 1-5. Satellite tiles over the Horn of Africa from Google, Bing, and Yahoo, as seen at Tile Compare
Further Resources
Critical cartography is a new term describing a new sort of thoughtful cartography (mapmaking) that carefully considers the effects of maps. When it comes to mapping, it is important to think: not just about where, but also about why and how. This will produce more exciting and useful maps for everyone. Not every Drupal map maker needs to be a deep thinker in the theory of cartography. But if you would like to get more into the philosophy of mapping, here are some useful and intriguing resources (more are in Appendix A):
The Map Room Blog
Radical Cartography
Strange Maps
Rethinking the Power of Maps
The Natures of Maps
The Power of Drupal
Given that we, indeed, do want mapping on our web application, why map with Drupal specifically? The number-one reason is that it is easy to get started with mapping in Drupal. As we will describe in this book, with just a couple modules and some clicking, you can have a simple map that tells your users the story of your data.
But the start is just the start. It gets complicated quite quickly. It’s not the most straightforward thing to get Drupal maps that not only look good but are responsive, flexible, and robust. But then, that’s not straightforward in any program or content management system. The great strength of Drupal is its relative simplicity, and its power to interact with content on your site and outside data sources.
Drupal as a CMS
That’s the key: Drupal is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Drupal provides a robust, flexible way of managing content. And this is what we want to do with our maps; we want to tell stories about our content; we want to make art with our data. Going back to the earlier point about maps being a conversation: while your map is having a conversation with your user, your underlying data is also having a continuous real-time conversation with your mapping.
In Drupal 7 there is an abstract data concept called an entity that is a container for a specific sort of data, such as a user account, a blog post, or a restaurant. All entities