@barton Great! You can definitely represent some of these things in farmOS already - and we are aiming for a lot of the ideas you describe! Well on our way… 
I recently started work on a “version 2” of the farmOS maps, which I’m excited about. We have some fun ideas, and one of the goals is to make it easier for others to experiment with as well (Starting work on farmOS-map library).
For now, we have a few good options, albeit in more than one place:
- Areas of different type (color coded) can be added to denote permanent fields, beds, buildings, etc. And new types can be added via a custom module.
- Assets can be located with their own geometry, tracked by movement logs so we maintain a history of where they’ve been. The current asset geometries can be viewed in the “Asset cluster map” (Managing Assets | farmOS).
- Logs can reference specific geometries (points/lines/polygons) in their own maps, so you can build a database of geo-located events (observations, activities, harvests, etc etc).
Most of what we do in permaculture is observation, being able to painlessly document some of the 2000 things we are likely to notice in a day would be helpful. being able to go home and pull up a map with the the location picture data etc. would be incredible.
Yes! That is what farmOS is designed for. We have the data architecture to store all that information going back in time (and forward) - and we’re mainly just refining how we display it now. You can already record observations in the field using either farmOS or the Field Kit app, and add geolocation to them, with photos. It’s possible - we’re working on making it easier now.
Part of the plan with the farmOS map library is to combine all the different “types” of maps in farmOS together into a single map - with more controls for deciding which layers you want to see. So you might be interested in following that progress: Issues · farmOS/farmOS-map · GitHub
The maps in farmOS are built on OpenLayers, which provides a lot of options out-of-the-box for adding layers from different sources. Vectors can be added from various formats like KML/KMZ (and farmOS supports importing KML/KMZ).
As for Inkscape - you can generally save those files as SVG, and Openlayers can display SVGs as an image layer (although I’ve never tried this myself): javascript - How can I use a SVG image as layer on OpenLayers-3 - Stack Overflow
Easily create new categories, types of areas, types of logs, types of activities etc.
Some of these customization require programming, but it isn’t too complicated, and there are working examples to look to for guidance. But it might be better to talk them through first, so I can better understand your thoughts and maybe provide suggestions.
In short - great thoughts! Thanks for starting the discussion!