Geospatial Information Management in Web-Based CMS Systems

This book evaluates the management of geospatial information in Web-based Open Source Content Management Systems (CMSs). Geospatial data can be managed by the CMS in several of the technology layers, on the database level, on the file system level as well as on the programming level. The following questions were addressed: How should geo data be structured by (web-based) CMSs so that the system, and the administrator, can efficiently and flexibly manage the geospatial data and display it in context? We created prototypes of the CMSs and installed and evaluated several plugins (WordPress) and modules (Drupal) as well as conducted research on the technology stacks. As is shown, the tested CMSs do not take advantage of the geospatial data type available in relational database systems like MySQL and PostGIS. Timing tests were developed to evaluate whether the CMSs should take advantage of the geospatial columns.