Greetings!
My name is Frank Liauw, a second year going on to third year Computer Science student from the National University of Singapore.
I am interested in contributing to the phpMyAdmin project over the coming summer, of which I have been a user for more than a decade.
I've had much experience in web development and programming, and have contributed in terms of extension development for other open source projects of which I was actively working on, such as Moodle.
I'm particularly interested in implementing OpenGIS support, as listed in the GSoC Idea List for the past 2 years ( https://wiki.phpmyadmin.net/pma/GSoC_2011_Ideas_List#OpenGIS_support).
I believe that this topic is of great relevance to me, as I am minoring in Geospatial Information Systems, and have experience with spatial analysis and databases, such as Geodatabase and shapefiles with ESRI ArcGIS.
I've looked into the supported spatial features of both MySQL and phpMyAdmin, and have found that phpMyAdmin already supports creation of columns with MySQL supported spatial types as well as well known text (WKT) and well known blob (WKB) spatial functions.
However, user input of spatial data is still very much textual with Backus-Naur grammar and is not sufficiently intuitive. It'd be interesting and useful to support graphical data input and spatial data representation with the following improvements:
1. Browser transformation to represent spatial data in a variety of formats, such as an image with point/line/polygon or Google Maps with overlay, 2. Spatial data entry with Google Map location pinning.
Any comments or feedback will be much appreciated.
Thank you for your time! =)
Frank LIAUW