[Phpmyadmin-devel] Spatial Support Improvements for GSoC 2011

[Piotr Przybylski]

2011/3/4 Liauw Jian Mei <liauw at nus.edu.sg>:
> 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

Ad 1.
Please consider SVG - all modern browsers support it, should be simple
to implement and in this case vectors would be much more usable than
bitmaps.

-- 
Piotr Przybylski