[Phpmyadmin-devel] Spatial Support Improvements for GSoC 2011

[Liauw Jian Mei]

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.phpmyadmin.net/pipermail/developers/attachments/20110304/5184815d/attachment.html>