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Hi all

I'm working on IWM's UK War Memorials Register project - https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/search - to help deliver location based search and map display. There are over 74,000 memorials in the database and most have a current location stored as latlon. Currently locations are displayed on individual records - e.g. half way down https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/104 - but there is no facility to either display a map of search results, nor to search within a specific area (other than to use existing textual facet filters such as town or county, for which the data is somewhat lacking.

What I am after is:

- examples displaying maps of cultural heritage content (obviously the ones that people really like, but also possibly dislike, and reasons why)

- examples perhaps even from the commercial sector of sites that people think have great location based searching (I'm thinking even the likes of Zoopla, Airbnb,  

- any 'best practice' front- and back-end technical solutions that people might be aware of for displaying large numbers of locations, including multiple items at one point; for reference, the data is delivered via a Solr endpoint and into a Drupal hosted site using Solarium - these could potentially be configured/optimised in any way needed

- any suggestions for sharing data e.g. to OpenStreetMap and Wikidata (together with the evidence I'm going to need to justify this!)

- recommendations for any experts out there who have handled the development of similar features!

I would also like to hear from anyone with existing online maps about their experiences, including any metrics or user testing insight about what users do or don't use (empirical or anecdotal). This could include features like location name/postcode search, tools for drawing search areas, selecting base map / data layers, zooming/panning, opening pop-ups etc

Thanks, James

PS for something to shoot at, here are a few random cultural sector things I dredged out of my memory banks (shared without comment):

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/map-search

https://britainfromabove.org.uk/en/map?country=global&view=map#1,336645,222987

https://www.historypin.org/en/explore/geo/51.467364,-0.1043,12/bounds/51.40337,-0.315444,51.531268,0.106843/sort/popular/paging/1/state/map

https://artsandculture.google.com/nearby

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James Morley
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