GIS is Confusing

If I hadn’t landed a job as a network admin, I probably would have gone into GIS (Geographic Information Systems.) Why? Because I love maps.

Recently I added a Gazetteer application to NJPineBarrens.com. In a nutshell this is a list of various places with short entries to put them into some sort of historic context. When you enter the information on the “place” you can put a latitude and longitude in a pair of fields. This will then pull up a Google Map with the location mapped out on a pin. Taking this a step farther, you can get a map showing all of the “places,” and by clicking on a pin, you’re linked to the specific gazetteer entry.

Sounds cool? Well, I also added a mashup that loads USGS topo maps of the area. The topo maps are a much better resource than the street or even hybrid maps, since they show a lot more detail, roads that don’t show up on the standard road map, etc.

I’m working on adding another map layer to the Gazetteer. I don’t want to give it away, but it’s going to contain data in WMS (web map service). So the challenge is to get the Google Maps API to deal with WMS, while simultaneously hacking the GMap plugin for Drupal to actually load the maps.

Oh, and I don’t know Javascript.

The URL syntax for loading the maps doesn’t seem so hard, and the WMS standard seems pretty cool. The confusing part is trying to geocode the location I need into the URL and, like I said before, get the GMap module to actually fetch the right map tiles.

I’m going into it blind, but I’m as blind as I was when I added the topo map data and that seems to work now.