Last week I had the opportunity to present at the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Summer Meeting held in Copper Mountain, CO. The Summer Meeting is a gathering of IT professionals from across several different agencies such as NASA, NOAA and USGS. Each year, the group comes together to talk about the challenges that they each face while trying to engage and support the scientific community.

When I got in on Wednesday a few of us got together to talk about how to kickstart the Science on Drupal group. While there’s been a science presence in the Drupal community for several years now in one form or another, there’s been a recent interest in pooling resources together to make a larger group. We had a great time strategizing how to grow the group over chips and salsa.

For my presentation, I went over various different tools for doing online mapping work, both with native Drupal tools and other toolsets.

One of the big challenges that this community has to face is how to work with large datasets that don’t fit neatly into a typical Drupal site. For my part, we spent a lot of time going over how to leverage tools like D3, CartoDB, GeoServer, and Mapbox to connect to data outside of Drupal and provide meaningful interaction with it.

They also exposed me to DEIMS, a Drupal distribution that they had collaborated on that also features some interesting ways to interact with external data. There was a great presentation at Drupalcon Austin on the distribution that’s definitely worth checking out.

If you’re interested in catching the presentation, the slides are posted on Github and the video is here. If you’re interested in catching up with what’s going on with the Drupal in Science working group, check out their page on groups.drupal.org.

Thanks again to Adam Shepherd and the rest of the ESIP Drupal Working Group for inviting me out to hang out and learn from their experiences.