Blacklight-Maps discussion notes

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017

Notes from the informal Blacklight-Maps discussion from Hydra Connect on Friday, October 3, held in the conference hotel lobby.

Facilitator: Jack Reed (Stanford)

Notetaker: Eben English (Boston Public Library)


Statement of Problem(s)
  • blacklight-maps currently lacks some of the features of GeoBlacklight [2], such as a map display in the catalog#show view
  • Display of search results on the map is limited to the number results returned by Blacklight pagination
  • Display of result details within the map view popup is problematic if there are a lot of results for a single location; scrolling through results in the popup is unpleasant
  • blacklight-maps depends on a somewhat clunky data structure in Solr for lat/long points corresponding to specific place names

Use Cases
These were the major use cases we discussed. All of these probably need a bit more fleshing out. Some examples with similar (not exact) functionality are listed as well.
  • Browse Everything
    When I am on the application home page
    and I want to see where all items in the repository are on a map
    and I click on "Browse by Location" (or something like this)
    I should see a map that shows all the data
    and if I click on a point for a location on the map
    it should display the location name and a link that lets me search for all items with that location
    and if I click on the search link
    I should see the search results displayed on the catalog#index page

    Examples: DPLA [3], NCSU Digital Collections [4]

  • Geolocation as Facet
    When I am on the search results view (catalog#index)
    and I click on the map view icon
    I should see all the locations for all of the results (geolocation as facet) displayed on the map
    and if I click on a point for a location on the map
    it should display the location name and a link that lets me refine my search by items with that location
    and if I click on the search link
    I should see the refined search results displayed on the catalog#index page

    Examples: DPLA [5]

  • Spatial Search
    When I am on the "map search" view
    and I select the search option
    and I select an area of the map (either with mouse or by zooming) and/or click search
    I should see the search results for items with geographic coordinates or bbox bounds overlapping the selected search area displayed on the catalog#index page

    Examples: WeoGeo [6], Old Maps Online [7]

  • Show View
    When I am on the item show view (catalog#show)
    I should see a map that displays the location(s) in the item metadata
    and if I click on the point for the location on the map
    it should display the location name and a link that lets me search for more items with that location
    and if I click on the search link
    I should see the search results displayed on the catalog#index page

    Examples: GeoBlacklight, Craigslist

Additional comments
  • Clustering good: clustering of results based on map zoom is desired; clusters should show number of results (like DPLA) rather than number of clustered locations (NCSU).
  • Solr requirements: what should be required in Solr record to make this all work? At the least, a location_rpt field [8] with either coordinate or bbox data.

Potential Problems & Pitfalls
  • Unspecific place names (e.g. "United States") which have a single latlong point in the geographic center of the region (this is a big problem on DPLA's map view)
    How should these be represented? Do we need special logic to deal with them? Should the responsibility for whether or not to display these (potentially unhelpful) entities be left up to the implementer?
  • Simultaneous display of points and bbox features on a single map
    How ugly could this get? Potential for user confusion, etc. 


Wish List
Blacklight parses text search for geographic data, returns map in search results, similar to Google.


Next Steps
BPL will begin trying to implement some of the use cases in a forked version of blacklight-maps.