joejoseph00
commented
12 years ago City of Ottawa construction projects maps is what you're working on right now I presume? http://ottawa.ca/en/city_hall/planningprojectsreports/construction/map/index.html
You'll want to be able to directly consume KML. Seeing as I wrote the spec for ArcGIS exporting , don't kill yourselves on fancy custom xml like some people wanted me to do on my last City of Ottawa contract. It appears KML is still the standard, and I'd use it again still in 2012, as it's got the most support and will give you the least head-aches.
Test out the performance of the API's of the various providers.
It seems like OpenLayers module for drupal supports the most map systems (OpenStreetMap, Virtual Earth, Google Maps, Bing, Yahoo, etc) .
First bit of advice, test the map API for KML load speeds and KML rendering speeds. I know that Google is blistering fast (provided you follow my ArcGIS export spec, and I recall that I wrote a script to clean out points on straight lines (no need to have more than two points to describe a straight line right? but it's been so long, it should be in your documentation at the city where I left it. I wrote a doc on generating clean KML for fast rendering. It appears you're probably still using it because the site renders nicely.
Compare loading speeds of your KML on the various platforms, test against the major browsers, this will give you a good idea what is usable and what isn't so you can quickly eliminate the ones that are too slow. As far as customizing your view, back in 2009 I did things that would work in stellant, there's probably more elegant ways to do things now but the same idea will apply, you'll want the map framework to dynamically add checkboxes for each new layer of KML you add. Back in 2009 we had an xml file that specified all the KML files, you might want to do a GUI in Drupal for that with the forms API, or you could just do it the old way. The javascript loaded the xml file, inside the xml were paths to KML files with a title description, one for english, one for french, and based on the number of kml files would load each one and as they loaded dynamically add the checkboxes by going into the DOM. Today with drupal you could do it the old way, or you could probably find a drupal way to do this.
If you can get communications off your back, you should be able to pump something out quick, last time I remember sitting in many meetings listenning to highly skilled people talk about colours and icons. People seemed to get very excited about these maps, then the FUD people come in and scare everyone about terms of use and the evil google plan to put advertising on your map and other FUD people (mostly internal city staff) come scare everyone into thinking that google is going to sue you for back pay on usage fees or that they'll change their terms of service in two days.
The fact that you're still using Google tells me that none of the FUD came true, and that Google maps is still the best platform and that there's no reason to change . However it does look like BING has come a long way, and others might have as well. Google was light years ahead of everyone, and probably still are way ahead. Do some benchmark tests, check for yourselves.
StephenOTT
mgifford
Looking over the GIS options for drupal, and it seems like the OpenLayers module is the most advanced. Anyone using anything else? Have anything custom developed?