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Links: Vesseltracker, earthquake, Vint Cerf on the geoweb

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It feels good to finally be caught up:

  • Ship locations in Google Earth: Vesseltracker not only shows you global ship traffic as KML, but also where and how they are berthed in port. The size and orientation of the ships is drawn as a polygon! There is a free version, plus a real-time pay version. (Via Belgeoblog)
  • Earthquake: Google Earth’s built-in Earthquake layer doesn’t show earthquakes unless you zoom in real close (ergo you know where to look), so use the USGS KML links to find the 7.9 magnitude Peru earthquake.
  • Bad weather: Google Earth Blog puts out a great collection of the best hurricane and weather-related network links. I’d only add Meteogroup’s global live weather forecasts, which includes the most out-of-the-way spots (like the poles).
  • Vint Cerf at GeoWeb 2007: Tobedetermined‘s Alexander van Dijk points to the videos of the speakers at GeoWeb 2007 Conference held a few weeks ago in Vancouver, BC, and especially recommends Vint Cerf’s presentation. Well worth the time investment.
  • AGU submissions: The American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting is coming up in San Francisco in December, and there’ll be a special session on “Using Geobrowsers for Science”. AGU encourages “the participation of developers, teachers, bloggers and others who involved in the evolution of Geobrowsers for use in science, education and beyond” so start submitting those presentations for poster sessions, with a deadline of 6 Sept. All you need to know is right here.
  • New Journal: The academic publication International Journal of Digital Earth will be launched in January 2008 and is looking for submissions. (Via KM Labs)
  • BC does KML: Jason Birch notices that British Columbia’s Electoral Boundaries Commission website is publishing proposed new boundaries as KML.
  • What’s in a name: The Korea Herald reports on another installment of people getting upset about user-generated content not agreeing with their own ideas about what places should be called. In this case, some Panoramio photos are being labelled with non-Korean names.

    The one twist here is that Panoramio’s photo layer is now a default layer, part of the Geographic web, which also includes Wikipedia and Google Earth Community. While you can edit any Wikipedia entry, you can’t really edit somebody else’s Panoramio labels, or at least flag them for perhaps being inaccurate or tendentious. (Flagging as “innapropriate or offensive” doesn’t allow you to explain you think the name is wrong.) So I think the article has something of a point (for a change).

  • More quadtrees: Via the comments, yet another Google quadtree visualization, by Thomas Landspurg.
  • 3D Warehouse to Second Life? Taking 3D objects such as those found in Google’s 3D Warehouse and importing them into Second Life has been a bit of a holy grail but also a technical challenge, and nobody to date has made a sturdy tool for doing this. It wouldn’t surprise me, however, that if anyone can do it it would be Andrew Hudson-Smith’s CASA team. It looks like they’ve almost cracked it.
  • Geoserver up to 1.5.3: Open source Geoserver hits version 1.5.3, adding much-improved KML support, and introducing support for GeoRSS.
  • ESRI ArcGIS Explorer reaches build 410: James Fee has the links and commentary.
  • Virtual Earth gets imagery update: Lots of new bird’s eye views in the US and Europe. Here’s the list.
  • Big 2K: A favorite mapping blog, The Map Room, hits a blogging milestone. Congrats!

5 thoughts on “Links: Vesseltracker, earthquake, Vint Cerf on the geoweb”

  1. I have to continue in my criticism of the USGS visualation, only because I’ve yet to see them ever provide a layer with the actual fault-lines being mapped. Placing a dot per magnitude of each seismic event doesn’t give me, or anyone else, much of a perspective on how it relates to the plates or the fault-lines near where each event occurs.

    I’m still waiting for USGS to get the visualization right — not just in the Google Earth layer, but their own representations on their web site(s).

  2. Daniel, the KML that the USGS provides does give me faultlines, as well as convergences. Have you downloaded a recent version?

  3. I see Techtonic Plates as of August 17. What I continue not to see, however, are all known fault lines. (Faults, as you know are located in various places. For instance, we have one that run through Illinois. Where is it?)

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