mapbox/tilemill — Issue #1083: Handling non-geodata in TileMill
Author: yhahn
Created: 2012-01-05 05:41:20+00:00
State: open
Labels: datasprint

Brain dump/sketch of upcoming non-geodata work. Past tickets #820, #941.

### Goals

- UI for adding/inspecting non-geodata to a project. These are not layers, but...
- Allow non-geodata to be "linked" or "joined" to layers which have geodata.

### Questions

- @springmeyer has mentioned that using Mapnik to do the loading/inspection of this data seems out of the scope of the Mapnik project, and this is probably true. Making TileMill do some very basic inspection of a very limited set of datasources may be the answer (all nongeo data converted to `sqlite` in `millstone` for instance).
- Joining is complex, we will need to hold the user's hand through this.
- Sequence/workflow issues around schema discovery, especially for remote data where we cannot inspect the file without localizing it first (costly).