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Open Source Geographic Tracking?
Walkingshark writes "I work for a company that needs to track people and equipment across the US as they move to, work on, and leave jobs. The boss has been looking at the typical mix of closed, proprietary software and has also considered building off our existing 10-year-old SQL database (with the kind of clunky interface you'd expect from a program built in the late '90s). I'd like to be able to bring him a good open source alternative, but so far I haven't been able to find anything that can do what we need. Ultimately, we need to be able to keep track of a few thousand separate people and pieces of equipment, and to move them in dynamically created groups to and from our locations and jobsites in a way that is sharable between workstations, with updates to location entered at one station being broadcast to all clients in real time. Ideally, this program needs to also give us access to road routing similar to the capability found on Google Maps. We'd doubtless need to be able to modify the source for customization, but I was hoping there was something we could find out there that had the core functionality we're looking for."
Exactly, this isn't difficult.
PseudoSQL:
select name,longitude,latitude from location order time desc limit 1.
Google Maps API and that should be it.
I didn't want to mess with the API and what I was plotting doesn't change quickly, so I just used PHP to create a KML file which I loaded through GoogleMaps/Earth.
Make it Ajaxy some 'inserts' of the data and ... that should be it. If the SQL database itself works, there is no reason that you need to replace it. It sounds like it's just the interface that is the problem.
I like Free Open Source Software. Please give me this highly specific software so that we can use it for free in our business. I don't want to actually develop it myself or give back to the community an way. FOSS FTW!!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You need to check out Postgresql, http://wwwpostgresql.org in combination with Postgis , http://postgis.refractions.net/. The postgis addon to postgresql allows you to use geometry or geographic field types to capture projected or lat/long coordinate data. You can then perform spatial queries on the data in the database using a string of sql. http://postgis.refractions.net/documentation/manual-1.5/ .
Think of it this way, with a normal database, you can say select all red-headed persons with the first name of Bob ( if you have hair color and first name in the database) . With a spatial database you can say select all red-headed persons with the first name of Bob who live within 200m of a fire hydrant on Main Street in the town of Springfield.
The cool part about this is that any application that can pass an SQL string to the database can now perform spatial queries ( intersections, points on a line, routing (http://pgrouting.postlbs.org/ ) .
So, you can spend many 10's of thousands of $$$$ on a proprietary software package that puts blobs in the database accessible only through their interface, or you can go with Postgresql/postgis and connect to and manipulate the data in any way you want, with plenty of options for commercial support.
OpenStreetMap and OpenLayers will give you a truly free platform to work with. No hidden costs or restrictions.