Drupal-based Map Application Generator(MapAppGen): an Application Generation Example for Famous Restaurants

Abstract

The demand for map applications in both Web and mobile environments has been rapidly increased with the population of Web and smart phone usage. Web-based map applications are mostly developed on such environments as ArcGIS and MapServer and mobile map applications are developed on such API levels as Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. But many parts of map applications are still constructed by coding because these environments don`t support high level of automation. Our MapAppGen that we have designed and implemented enhances the Web-based map application productivity by generating the map related modules that can be applied to the Drupal that is one of popular content management systems(CMS`s). Comparing the applications that are constructed by the Drupal-supported GMap or NodeMap, the applications that are constructed by MapAppGen provide information on not only the interested geographical feature but also its related geographical features. MapAppGen uses Google Maps API and Drupal is a module-based system that supports the creation, composition and management of contents. We are now working on automatic generation of mobile map applications with MapAppGen.