Thursday, October 20, 2011

Mapping Archival Collections via Atom

As mentioned in a previous blog post, EADitor enables georeferencing of archival collections, either as a whole or perhaps on the component level, by tapping into APIs provided by geonames.org.  A mapping interface solicits user input of facets to query EADitor's built-in Solr-to-KML service to render results in the form of an OpenLayers map.

Currently, only one collection in the American Numismatic Society Archives has been georeferenced, but we expect to add more geographic locations in the coming weeks and months as we continue to refine the collections' descriptions.  The more places that have been added into the Solr index, the more useful the Ajax-driven facet querying interface will be.

On top of this, GML points have been added into the Atom feed for the collection.  Like KML, the Atom feed is driven by Solr and can be queried with the Lucene syntax.  Google Maps is capable of rendering an Atom feed which contains GML points, which you can see here.

The ANS code is about a week ahead of what exists in the Google Code trunk for the EADitor general distribution, but I will work on integrating these new mapping features into the trunk before the beta release that should come in early November.