[Rt-devel] Spatially enabled RT - recipe and suggestion

[Geoff Clitheroe]

Hi,

I have spatially enabled our RT instance - users can assign location
based custom fields to tickets and then plot search results on a map.
I have described the approach I took in the wiki:
http://wiki.bestpractical.com/view/SpatialRT

The basic approach relies on spatial entities being put in the
Description field of Custom Fields, these can then be parsed in search
results and returned as an XML file that can be plotted on maps.  The
approach could be made more generic by adding a separate spatial field
to the custom fields and returning KML.  While using a spatially aware
DB would bring some distinct advantages it would restrict the back end
support quite badly.  On that note does anyone know of an embeddable
spatially aware DB, pref pure java?

By way of back ground, I work on this project http://www.geonet.org.nz
and we run a country wide network of sensors
http://magma.geonet.org.nz/resources/netmap/ with a team of
technicians installing and maintaining the network - the spatial
aspect to RT allows more efficient planning of field work (e.g. "I'm
on the way to somewhere, is there anything I can fix on the way?").

Note about the web mapping UI: the above network maps are custom
written (for the NZMG projection) in openLaszlo and delivered using
flash.  We have tried all the FOSS DHTML variants and found that IE
browsers (76% of our clients) have problems rendering maps with more
than ~500 points _and_ having mouse over functionality.  This is worth
considering in light of the number of features to display or the
browsers to be supported.

If anyone would like to know more or about the underlying data model
I'm happy to share.

Cheers,
Geoff