Geospatial Content Management System

A Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) is a Content Management System where objects (users, images, articles, blogs..) can have a Latitude, Longitude position to be displayed on an online interactive map. In addition the online maps link to informational pages (wiki pages essentially) on the data represented.

A GeoCMS can have a map of registered users allowing to build communities geographically, by looking at users location. The help of wiki for describing geographical layers present a simple way to solve the problem of geographical metadata.

Since the advent of [http://maps.google.com/ Google Maps] and the publication of its API, numerous users have used online maps to illustrate their web pages. Google Maps is in itself not a GeoCMS but is a powerful building block.

Similarly [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu Mapserver] is also a powerful building block for creating GeoCMS.

TikiWiki was the first CMS to become a GeoCMS in early 2003, it is now becoming popular on various other CMS especially since the publication of the Mapserver API in 2002 to many scripting languages: PHP, Python, Perl, Java,...

GeoCMS List

*Drupal - see [http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/65 geo modules]
*Midgard CMS - see [http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/the-midgard-position.html Positioning module]
*Plone - see [http://plone.org/products/by-category/geospatial geo plugins]
*TikiWiki CMS/Groupware - see [http://maps.tikiwiki.org TikiMaps]
*WordPress - see [http://georss.org/geopress GeoPress]
*Zikula - examples: [http://code.zikula.org/projects/mymap myMap] [http://code.zikula.org/projects/locations locations] [http://dev.pnconcept.com/ GoogleMap]
*GooGIS - examples: [http://www.googis.de/rheinbach myMap]

GeoCMS comparison

Mapstraction supports GoogleMaps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Map24, MultiMap, MapQuest, and FreeEarth.