1

Re: Progress update - February

It's about time we gave you an update on the progress of the Indicia project, since we have now completed the first development phase. Well, so far we have achieved the following:
1) Developed a "Core Module" that allows you to administer the websites linked to your Indicia setup, including setting up species lists, locations, surveys and other termlists that can be made available during data entry.
2) Developed a suite of data entry components using PHP that you can easily drop onto a web page to quickly build data entry pages. This includes things like auto-complete text boxes that can be linked to a species or term list, drop down controls, date pickers, map-pickers for selecting a spatial reference from a map and so forth. There are also components that allow you to search for places on the map by typing in a post code or place name, and components which allow images to be uploaded for occurrences.
3) Ability to either enter a single species occurrence or a grid of species via a single data entry page.
4) Web services that allow the data captured to be accessed as XML, JSON or CSV.
5) Web services that provide facilities such as validation or spatial reference conversions which may be useful.
6) Developed the ability to extend the core data model by adding "custom attributes". For example, you can add an attribute to capture DAFOR abundance values for occurrences in a particular survey.
7) Started work on the components required to add data browsing and mapping facilities to an online recording website.
8) Created some tutorials on the Wiki for installation and also building basic data entry pages.

In summary, we now have a toolkit that is able to quickly develop new data entry pages for capturing wildlife records, though there is more to do yet particularly with respect to what happens to the data once it has been captured.

The next phase of development will focus on :
1) the continued development of data browsing and reporting facilities
2) work on the data flow to handle comments on observations and verification processes
3) Writing and enhancing the tutorials on the Wiki
4) Further development of the mapping components you will be able to drop into your website.

On top of that there are lots of other things to do such as support for microformats and Flickr integration so we will be keeping busy!

Best wishes

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

2

Re: Progress update - February

Great work - things are really moving at a rapid clip.

You mention further development of the mapping components and this reminded me: have you seen that MultiMap now do OS25K (the Explorer scale) maps? It was announced on their blog recently:

http://blog.multimap.com/2009/01/21/os-explorer-maps-on-multimapcom/

It's available via their API too, so could potentially be used in Indicia.

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

3

Re: Progress update - February

Hi Charles

We are using OpenLayers for the mapping front end since we can plug all sorts of background layers into it. The components provide several layers out of the box such as the Google and MS Virtual Earth layers, but you can get a callback to add any additional layers you have access to. We'll add the Multimap OS layers since they will be an excellent addition - thanks for the tip.

Best Wishes

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

4

Re: Progress update - February

Unfortunately, on closer investigation, the explorer level maps are not available through the api: http://forums.multimap.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=165.

I'll try and get the default and landranger maps added as options, however.

5

Re: Progress update - February

Now added the landranger maps from the multimap api into the map demo.