Hi Caty, Fawad, all,
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* I've read again the GSOC project description. The main purpose of the application is to allow multiple people to create POIs and other shapes on the Maps. There is a note that the POIs will have additional information about the location. Some questions: ** can a POI be displayed in multiple Maps? For example: if we someone creates a 'Centre Pompidou' POI in a page, where adds information about the place, images, etc. Should we be able to display this POI in multiple maps (one that contains museums, while others contain modern architecture)?
I would say it's important that a point of interest or any other entity can be present in multiple maps indeed. A map is defined in particular by a query imho – I would suggest a Solr query as argued on the design page, what do you think? – which returns a set of elements. Then the user can refine this set at will using full-text search, facets or spatial search.
** in any case, the POI storage could be done in objects or in individual pages. We need to think about performance too. Pages will lots of objects can have performance issues, so storing as pages (that will contain objects for POI type) might be better?
Ideally that'd be great to support both options I would say. In terms of priority I would go for one object per page to start with. Typically, in the encyclopedia use case defined in the design page, having one object attached to each target page would be very convenient imho: it would ease the maintenance of information, both textual and geographical, related to each page. Supporting multiple objects per page could be quite useful as well. Imagine for instance that we want to represent the "Battle of the Somme" on a map. The content itself may refer to multiple locations (as on the Wikipedia article below and its static image map representation), so it could be handy to let the user input all these locations (points, areas, lines...) as objects attached to the "Battle of the Somme" page itself without the need to create individual pages for each location. There is no reason to hit a very large number of objects in this scenario though. What do you think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme
* Maps will also be pages, containing configuration (custom backgrounds), etc.
Indeed, a map page will consist of a map configuration imho. We need to define what is needed to configure a map, beside the query. The visual configuration is important as well and can be possibly complex, and other options could arise... Stéphane -- Stéphane Laurière XWiki – https://xwiki.com
