Upgrade StorageGeotagging
It would be great to have some kind of support for geotagging items. There is the place field, but it usually refers to the place of publication, which in itself is rather a useless piece of information, besides it only supports place names, not coordinates.
Two complementary kinds of implementing geotagging come to mind:
1. Support for directly adding coordinates and bounding boxes to an item, i.e. as a separate field.
2. Geotags. Either as a separate from normal tagging, with the possibillty to add coordinates to a tag or a way to mark a tag as a geotag, so it can be used for geocoding via a plugin.
Visualization (like the Map plugin which does not seem to work with 3.0) & geographic search certainly would best be implemented as plugins or 3rd party applications, but the geodata itself should reside in Zotero.
Cheers,
Torsti
Two complementary kinds of implementing geotagging come to mind:
1. Support for directly adding coordinates and bounding boxes to an item, i.e. as a separate field.
2. Geotags. Either as a separate from normal tagging, with the possibillty to add coordinates to a tag or a way to mark a tag as a geotag, so it can be used for geocoding via a plugin.
Visualization (like the Map plugin which does not seem to work with 3.0) & geographic search certainly would best be implemented as plugins or 3rd party applications, but the geodata itself should reside in Zotero.
Cheers,
Torsti
The place of publication is something quite different. And, if I understand Zotero Maps correctly, when it searches .pdfs, it would find the placenames of where the authors are located and other potentially irrelevant data. These are not the same as "geotagging" the subject(s) of the reference, as noted in the first comment
I have set placename tags for many of the references in my library (that are relevant to this kind of search/mapping). But it would be better to have specific fields in info, I would think. Ideally, one could export all the fields in the info pane to an attribute table for, say, ArcGIS. ArcGIS could then map the references. I think this can be accomplished if the zotero folder (collection) could be exported to an Excel file or its equivlent. (Can this be done, ideally being able to select which fields to include?)
I don't know anything about the programming side of this, but is it difficult to do?
We've been playing around with this idea now for a little while and have created a demonstration site - http://www.JournalMap.org. It would be incredible if we could link this effort into Zotero for geotagged articles and extend geographic searching to Zotero.
Even starting small could be a significant first step. Create some functionality for users to geotag their own publications - maybe just with a point at first and then build out support for more complex feature types. Having the geographic information exposed through the API would be important so that other people could build geographic searching into their sites as well.
So I'd guess that core devs are going to be rather busy for the foreseeable future and I don't see major added functionality like this happening anytime soon without either a grant or major work by third-party developers.
I say all this as a well-informed bystander and not as an official pronouncement, so while I don't think I am, I could be wrong.