Spatial Wiki 1 - Objectives

This is the first article in a series on building a Spatial Wiki.  The notes are being put together for a Tutorial to be presented at the 2011 FOSS4G Conference in Denver, Colorado.

It's good to start with a direction so here are some quick objectives:

• Spatial References - Wiki articles can be spatially referenced to a point at least, perhaps a line or polygon.  The spatial references will go into a true spatial database, something we can display with all our other GIS data.
• Spatial Search - Front and center in the Wiki there needs to be spatial searching capabilities, for example a map on the homepage showing the locations of all the articles, the kind of thing when you click on a point you can get more information and goto the article associated with the reference.

Here is the abstract for the talk:

Wiki and Spatial tools make a powerful combination for building and maintaining location based knowledge. The workshop will present a complete exercise, building a Spatial Wiki from the ground-up hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance using 100% free and open source tools including Ubuntu, MediaWiki, Apache, GeoServer, OpenLayers, and PostGIS. Articles in the Wiki will be spatially enabled, and discoverable via the Wiki's built-in search capabilities, or a click-able map index. Spatial reference(s) will be maintained in a back-end spatial database and updated dynamically via markup in the article itself. GeoServer will be used to serve the spatial data and presented in the Wiki articles using OpenLayers with background data from OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Bing, or similar. Relevant MediaWiki extensions, server-side scripts and other "enablers" will be made available as part of the workshop, but will not be covered in detail. Attendees can expect to depart the course with their own fully operational Spatial Wiki along with a basic knowledge of a variety of excellent free and open source tools.

See the next article on Spatial Wiki Research