A crowdsourced Map Edit application for enviornmental cause

Question

I want to create an application where users can mark on map location of polluting factories. Google map provides a MAP editor feature. We would like to have our own website like www.toxic-map.org where people could mark these locations. What would be the best approach for this?

Additionally we should be able to backup this database which could be cross checked or used for other purposes.

This will enable us to have little accurate census of such entities and thereby helping us in the fight against these environment harming, illegal factories. Most of our work is focused on developing countries of Asia.

Edited: Google maps is one of the options. I am open to other possible solutions as well. I am looking at something we could do quick prototyping in.

Thank you in advance!!

Answer 1

On the client side, I recommend you to have a look at OpenLayers, a free and open source web mapping framework released under a BSD-style License. It is completely written in Javascript and offers a lot of functionality, including the features that your application may need (Add markers to the map, drag them to adjust the locations, ...).

It also supports dozens of different geographic data formats and services such as WMS, KML or Google Maps.

If you are worried about licensing issues regarding the use of Google Maps, you can use other global data sources like OpenStreetMap or a public WMS if they provide enough coverage of your area of interest.

On the server side, I agree with the answer provided by Daniel Vassallo. I will just add a little detail and recommend you to serve the markers in a standard format natively supported by OpenLayers like KML, GeoJSON or GeoRSS. It will make really easy to draw the markers on the map.

Looks like a really interesting project, I hope you are lucky starting it up.