- Excellent: Bernie Krause’s biophony recordings, soundscapes of nature, look like they’ll be turned into a KML layer soon, reports O’reilly Radar. Until then, try Freesound, a site with georeferenced ambient sounds that comes with its own KML layer. Still one of my favorites. (More about the possibilities for navigating using sound for the sight impaired here.)
- Barry Hunter is just fantastic: He develops a hack for WordPress (one of the most popular blogging content management tools out there) that lets you define coordinates for blog entries and then view these entries as a KML feed. He then makes it free for all to use. (Other KML plugins for CMSes: Blojsom for Mac, Drupal, and am I missing any?)
- Apprently, GIS professionals have long been on the lookout for an SDI, which is a Spatial Data Infrastructure and not a Strategic Defense Initiative as I so innocently assumed. (Can you imagine what a Google Strategic Defense Initiative would look like, though? Probably like this:-)
The conclusion seems to be that Google’s KML search is not an SDI — yet. Allan Doyle sees the glass half full, while James Fee tends towards the half empty view. The sticking point? Google Earth is only a free client for personal and educational use. You still can’t use it at work without paying for the pro version, which is very unlike a web browser. Allan and James have a point, and it is one I thought would have been cleared up by now.
Meanwhile, Sean Gillies moots one way in which WMS services could announce themselves in Google Earth — via KML file, duly indexed.
- Tobedetermined‘s Alexander van Dijk actually read to the very end of the web page by those MIT researchers on China’s missile technology, and notes that they’ve built an application that will calculate optimal trajectories for anti-satellite missiles and automatically produce the output as KML. This brings the notion of directions in Google Earth to a whole new level… :-)
- Google Earth Blog has the details on the latest default layer refresh in Google Earth. Main attraction: The number of Panoramio photos listed quintuples to 400,000.
- Be careful when travelling with your 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. It looks just like a detonator to airline security personnel who aren’t yet on the cutting edge of technology…
- More 2D online mapping goodness. Check out the revamp of Sweden’s Eniro maps. A candidate for the nicest interface yet, but also: Click on “GPS coordinater” and “Vägkameror” for some very useful functionality…
3 thoughts on “Links: Biophony; Geo-WordPress; SDI?”
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He Stefan,
Care for a game of Google SDI, using MIT’s Missile Flyout programme? ;)
Haven’t tested it yet, but should be possible and fun…
Btw, there is another nice Virtual Globe visualisation of the Chinese ASAT test at STK’s Center for Space Standards & Innovation.
KML for CMS? I released http://plone.org/products/pleiadesgeocoder last summer. It’s producing KML from the Pleiades classical world workspace and gazetteer. For example, search for
classical settlement +Pleiades
roman settlement +Pleiades
unnamed bridge +Pleiades
in Google Earth with modern Turkey as your spatial context. Killer photos of bridges and aqueducts near those last placemarks.
Cool. I’ve been puting together my own KML feed from WordPress but it looks like this fella has gotten far enough to show off his code. I might switch across, or at least take a peak at what he’s written. GeoPress really is handy for this sort of stuff