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My geologist colleagues are asking for a self-hosted website with the following features:

  • A map with points for them to create and attach measurements to. Points should be grouped/filtered by expedition and kind of measurement. Clicking on a point on the map should result in a pop-up containing the measurements for the point.
  • A tabular interface to edit existing points or measurements and enter new points or measurements. Placing points on the map by pointing an clicking is not at all important; the coordinates are expected to be copied & pasted from a lab journal together with the measurement results.
  • Wiki-style editable pages with file attachments for each expedition.

The number of expeditions is less than 10 per year; the number of points in an expedition is up to a few 100s; the number of kinds of measurements is up to a few 10s. The dataset is expected to be sparse: not all kinds of measurements are performed on all samples, and most expeditions sample at different coordinates.

Semantic MediaWiki with the Maps extension almost does what we need, except I don't know how to fulfil the second requirement. As far as I understand Semantic MediaWiki, it's possible to construct very elaborate queries and place their results on the map with pop-ups subject to a template I could create, but I'd have to create a wiki page per sampling point, because I can't set multiple properties of the same type in a page.

Any other MediaWiki extensions I'm overlooking? Any other way I could achieve the desired result?

This feels deceptively simple enough that one could probably code an approximation of the desired feature set by themselves, but safely accepting user-generated content (especially pages and file attachments) could be annoying to get right.

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In the end, we went with Semantic MediaWiki + Maps + Semantic Forms + Semantic Scribunto, creating one wiki page per sampling point.

The expedition pages are all generated from a template, making it easy to list the existing sampling points with {{Special:PrefixIndex/{{FULLPAGENAME}}/ |hideredirects=1 |stripprefix=1}} and create a new sampling point with {{#forminput:form=SamplingPoint|super_page={{FULLPAGENAME}}}}, and the sampling point pages make use of Semantic Forms to allow editing all kinds of measurements using [[Special:FormEdit/SamplingPoint/{{FULLPAGENAME}}|Edit measurements for this sampling point]].

The worst part was having to write a Lua module in Semantic Scribunto to (1) query for all kinds of measurements, (2) group them by sampling point (have I missed a GROUP BY in Semantic MediaWiki?) and (3) generate wiki markup to display a map of those. Basically, it's

function(frame)
 local sampling_points = mw.smw.getQueryResult(...)
 return frame:preprocess('<display_map service="leaflet" height="...">\n' ..
  table.concat(map(sampling_points, format_sampling_point), '\n') ..
  '</display_map>'
 )

combined with format_sampling_point generating the Location~Popup title~Popup text~File:CustomIcon markup for the Maps extension to render. The Popup text includes some <table>s to summarise the information. It's almost surprising that it still works.

A custom web application is still in the early stage of development and may be not completed at all, so the 80/20 rule wins again.

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