Open SMIL

Open SMIL is an effort of combining GIS and SharePoint. I build SMIL over 5 years ago. The company I working for using SMIL in various projects and industries. That implies the platform is flexible and customisable. And maybe the most important thing, it addresses change. The users always want another button, more information, authorisation (in my experience rarely used but often asked for of some reason, maybe it is a culture thing?)

However, GIS has a reputation being expensive and complicated. SharePoint provides a highly customisable platform and Bing Maps is a platform with great features covering world wide data. Combining these platforms platform providing a light GIS have been the target of the OpenSMIL project.

OpenSMIL has i mobile map client connected to a SharePoint site, with geo enabled SharePoint lists represented as GIS layers. The mobile client runs in a browser in a SharePoint context. With this tool the user can collect data. The data is stored into a SharePoint list so it is available immediately in SharePoint.

Inside SharePoint there is a WebPart showing the layers (SharePoint lists with geographical information). SharePoint list items are plotted on the map and are clickable.
   

SharePoint lists have two maps, one preview that shows on mouseover an icon in the list.And another showing the item. The user can create new or change geometry. For example draw a polygon that might represent the area for a document.
   

In order to share geographical data with others you can invite them use your SharePoint site or export a list as a KML file. KML is standard See OGC.

But how to enable i list or document library to store geographical information? Easy, just add a column, give it a name and add a new field to the list.

For project place visit, project site. Or jump right into the code.

Using Bing services to validate addresses

Bing Maps services provides a feature for geocoding. A way to increase user input address quality, for example in SharePoint, is to present address quality feedback for the user. I've done that with a custom field.

This is the feedback I want to give to the user. I start to structure the application such as:

Why do I use HTTP handlers in SharePoint? In my opiniun they are easier to install than WCF services in SharePoint. But they are low level services. In order to get them to work I have to point out the assembly and the webhandler such as:
<%@ Assembly Name="OpenSMIL.Server, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=Neutral, PublicKeyToken=deb5cb40dd7862f6" %>
<%@ WebHandler Language="C#" CodeBehind="ValidateAddress.ashx.cs" Class="OpenSMIL.Server.ValidateAddress" %>
After that the server side development is pretty straight forward. As you can see in the image to the left the server code is divided into two seperate parts. The HTTP-handler, wich just needs some codebehind and let the other code worry about the Bing geocoding logic. And that is just a few lines of code.

And the code to ask Bing..

That's all for the services. In order to build a custom field here is a tutorial . And this article can come handy.

I'm almost done, all that is left is a XML-file describing for SharePoint about this field.

What is left now is just some JavaScript for rendering and communicating with the server. I have intentially left out jQuery and other JS libraries since it is basically just an Ajax requests.

That is it. All code is available here.

SMIL Part 1

This is the first of a series of posts about SMIL. This post will be an overview and the later one will be more technical.

SMIL (SharePoint Map Integration Layer) is an open source project with the aim to geo-enable SharePoint. After all, almost all information has a location, almost 94% according to some. So geo-enable SharePoint makes sense. SMIL takes advantages of all the juicy stuff in SharePoint, document management, images, versioning, workflows etc and adds a geo-layer above SharePoint.

SMIL, is built with Bing Maps Silverlight control as map control with Deep Earth Toolkit on top.

Each list that contains geographical information, i e has SMILs custom datafield, are exposed via GeoRss-feeds. Also, the list is per default a group in a layer panel and each view in SharePoint a layer in the layer panel. There are many advantages with this approach since any SharePoint administrator or power user can build, and customize views, and filtering data from SharePoint.

After installation, the next blog post, you have SMIL running you can easily geo-tag any document, issue, task. For example you can start planning issues according to where they are and how an issue is in geographical relationship with issue. Or you might have resource planning tool in SharePoint and you want to know where things are. Do you have a lot of contracts for real estates - you can add them on a map. There are many applications and people tend to like maps!

List and List Items

In order to geo-reference list items in SharePoint all you have to do is to add a column with the custom data field, SMIL.Coordiante to a list. Then you can just start to add push pins to represent the location of the item or you can search for a location. If you view the item, the map is still interactive but you cannot move the pushpin, you need to edit the SharePoint item to do that – standard SharePoint.

   

As mentioned SMIL using SharePoint filtering to filter data, but you can select surrounding information in SharePoint from a selected item in a map, if you have connected the Web Part to a corresponding List View Web Part. Each item has an info box on the map displaying metadata from that item inte SharePoint and you can change the view to get more or less information of that item. The idea is to have a short description view and a detailed view.

Images

SMIL also extract EXIF information from geo-tagged images and plot thumbnails on the map. If you don’t have a camera that stores coordinates along with the EXIF information you can just geo-reference them in SharePoint just as with any other list item, by using SMIL’s default geo-referencing tool.

Part 2 >>

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Maps,Map,GIS,Bing Maps,DeepEarth,Sivlerlight,EXIF

DeepEarth Toolkit för Bing Maps

Det är bekräftat. Jag ska hålla en session på Tech Days i år. Sessionen kommer att handla om DeepEarth Toolkit för Bing Maps. Det kommer att handla om hur du kan integrera in kartor i SharePoint och hur du där kan hantera bilder, listor, dokument etc. Sen kommer jag förhoppningsvis hinna visa exempel på exempel på hur man kan berika sin applikation med multitouch.

Välkommen.