I wonder how and where the Geolocation and/or the Neatline plugins storing geodata for each specific item.
The reason why I am asking is that, until now, I have only be able to add geodata to single items manually, one by one.
Instead, I would like to be able to add the geodata (lat/long for points, even better if polygons allowed) for a large number of items, possibly at the CSV import phase. Typically, I would use google maps or an SIG application locally to locate each of the items, then export this data as a dataset (CSV file, for instance), and upload to Omeka (for instance as a column in the CSV import file).
Is this actually possible?
Perhaps am I asking the wrong question: is there another way to avoid the burden of having to manually specify the geographical location of each Omeka item , one-by-one, and WITHIN Omeka?
I would also value the option to be able to do this at the CSV import stage. We have uploaded around 12,000 images to our archive and each one has had the lat/long added manually!
Inevitably we have missed a few - so it would also be good to have the option to search for items without lat/long coords so that we can update them.
So, it seems that both the Geolocation and Neatline plugins have been DESIGNED to require manual geolocation of each item individually. After many hours reading across multiple web locations:
Geolocation: the only place where this is explicitly stated is in Omeka Classic manual’s “Site planning tips page” (!!!)
Do you want to display items on a map? Install the Geolocation plugin, you must geolocate each item individually.
However, it seems that there has been serious attempts to allow Geolocation to retrieve geodata from the DC:Coverage field or from a custom “geolocation” set of fields (@Daniel_KM?), as well as to provide Geolocation support for CSV import (@mjlassila?) .
It seems however that the most recent versions of Neatline do allow, especially if the NeatlineFeature plugin is installed alongside, to retrieve geodata from an item’s DC:Coverage field. Except that:
Neatline will recognize only WKT coordinates (metric coordinates in the Pseudo-Mercator EPSG:3857 coordinate system), instead of the commonly used WGS84 degree-based coordinates. Unfortunately, there seems to be no integrated script to convert such coordinates. Among other reasons, because WKT allows many different figures (points, polygones, linestrings, etc…). I don’t know if drawing figures in a GIS software would allow exporting in a readable WKT format. (see the surrealistic explanation here)
Neatline is basically misusing the DC:Coverage field (see CSV Import and Neatline, requiring the above format which is not DC-standard compliant, and retrieving it to Neatline’s own separate database… Now that the known conflicts between Neatline and Geolocation plugins also seem to have been solved, this is quite annoying.
Provided that one is ready to face these difficulties and live along with the related downturns, then the solution (to be tested) is:
“Geolocation and CSV Import”, which points to a forked CSV Import module for Omeka S (and potentially to another plugin by the same author [@Daniel_KM] for Omeka Classic : “CSV Import +”).
It should do the trick, by adding columns for latitude, longitude, zoom level, and other Geolocation required data…