Add option to add geospatial metadata to articles to improve discovery

[nuest]

[This feature is motivated by the EarthArXiv preprint server, but I imagine it being useful for other journals as well. I'll stick to preprints in the following for simplicity.]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

It can be hard to keep track of new preprints coming out, or to identify work that is relevant to a researcher's work. You can subscribe to feeds or trust social media, but these are also largely based on manual searching and keywords in the title or abstract, which are readily accessible pieces of information. I'm convinced that geospatial metadata could play a great role to help researchers find interesting works. We are working on an OJS plug-in to achieve just that and you can find more in this abstract.

I think this would be a great feature for Janeway too, especially for EarthArXiv or other instances where articles have a clear spatial component.

Describe the solution you'd like

On submission the author is provided the option to enter geospatial metadata. A map is shown where the author can either draw a rectangle (bounding box) or an arbitrary geometry. This geometry is stored in the database.

The same could be done for a "temporal bounding box", so a period of time that the submission is relevant for.

The reader on the website is given the options to

1. see all articles on a map, and by clicking on a geometry, the name and title are shown and the user can click on a link to open the article page
2. can filter search results by providing a time period and/or zoom into a specific area/draw an area of interest on a map

Additional context

I'm happy to contribute code here, though not in the near future, possibly autumn next year. The OJS plug-in under under development beta release of the OJS plugin (https://github.com/TIBHannover/optimetaGeo) might provide some helpful snippets on the UI/mapping side.

I'm sure this is not a simple feature, because to leverage it fully you need a spatial index on the database, which might not be available out of the box, etc.

[nuest]

Just FYI: I'm still interested in this and working in a related project (https://projects.tib.eu/optimeta). I'm looking for a student to explore this topic in a thesis. So please keep the issue open :smile:

[nuest]

Possibly interested servers/journals because their work has a clear :world_map: spatial component :earth_africa: :earth_asia: :earth_americas:

• https://www.ecoevorxiv.com/
• https://eartharxiv.org/

[nuest]

Short update: we have secured funding :tada: for this development (yes, we have never contributed to Janeway before, but we're optimists) as part of the project KOMET :comet: https://projects.tib.eu/komet

Our current project schedule plans the development of this feature for Q2 2025, but that does make it unlikely we can properly coordinate with you, and we do have hopes that we can convince you to put the feature into our :heart: favourite preprint servers EarthArxiv and EcoEvoArxiv... I'm going to reach out via email to schedule a first conversation, but wanted to revive the issue, too!

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KOMET task overview

• Extend Janeway metadata form (submission, editing/review) to support geospatial metadata, i.e. multiple locations/areas/tracks and time points/periods (re-use geoOjs client side code if possible)
• Extend Janeway article (landing) page to display geospatial metadata (sidebar?)
• Extend Janeway journal / issue / subject pages to show a map with all related articles' geometadata
• Implement workflow to add geospatial metadata to already published articles

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Just noting a few questions down here to discuss (in person):

• Q1 Can we realise this with a plug-in?
• Q2 Is it realistic to pull in a few JavaScript dependencies to realise the map in the frontend? Do you have any policy on that (like, max page size)?
• Q3 How much do you know about or are involved in deployments? Is it realistic to plan using a database extension or a system library that needs to be installed?
• (to be extended) ...