Drupal has rich facilities for indexing and searching content, allowing you to create or use existing "views" that help you to filter and find data based on, for example, text matches, date ranges, keywords and tags.
Adding a geographic component to information allows you to also consider and view your data spatially. In fact, in Drupal terminology, a map is simply a geographic view of a set of entities in your database.
In this sense, although lots of effort has gone into making Drupal work nicely with geographic locations, none of that work has reduced the importance of all the other ways you might want to search and think about the data you have created. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to create a web map and maybe include some photos on it, you would have started with fairly specialized geographic software and built your map, adapting it as necessary to add the non-geographic elements (photos, other multimedia, text information). In that system, when you were done, you would have been able to look at your data geographically and, if you were lucky, there may have been some interfaces, other than querying the underlying database directly, that would have allowed you to find data using other criteria (e.g., text searches, category tags, dates). If you were unlucky the map may have been the only way for you to get at the data - your organizing view might have restricted your use of that data to only a spatial perspective.
The work required to create geographic information systems and web maps has often required such effort that other ways of using the data got pushed to the side. This is still true of some systems today. The map is seen as the most important element of the system - the organizing view of the data. Drupal has always been focused on flexible uses of complex data and in this a geographic view is important but not more important.
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