e-ality, a German blog, busts out with two cool innovations. First, a page that converts International Gliding Commission (IGC) files into KML, so that anyone doing air-sports can now impress their friends with their paragliding escapades in Google Earth (as XAlps paragliding contestants did in an earlier Ogle Earth post).
Second, e-ality’s WordPress-driven blogging engine now features some kind of geodata integration that automatically generates Google Maps and Google Earth links for blog posts. This post says that it’s all a work in progress (translation into French, okay, kidding, English) and we’re not yet given a peek under the hood, but I am all for blog publishing plug-ins that allow us to treat geodata properly. Geodata is the missing link (literally, ha) to the real world, and so often blog posts are about specific locations.
But that’s not all. The German-language version of the IGC converter page links to another site that has KMZ files with translucent extruded polygons denoting all the no-fly zones for air-sports in all of Europe. It looks very impressive in Google Earth.
(More links: A German paragliding thread about IGC and Google Earth; a page that shows IGC files in Google Maps.)
Due to the fact that there is a growing number of international requests for the igc kml converter page I translated the page and the application to English: http://www.e-ality.de/i2ge_e
Sorry for the inconvenience, I wasn’t aware that this little tool could become that interesting to international visitors…
By the way: It’s “Vorsprung durch Technik” :-)
Funny, I googled ‘Forsprung durch teknik’ to “spellcheck” it and saw an Audi dealer as the first entry (albeit in South Africa, I now realize) and decided that that was good enough for me.
Ogle Earth is now the top entry for “Forsprung durch teknik”:-) At least ‘teknik is good Swedish.
It is actually spelled “Vorsprung durch Technik” [~advantage through technical skills]. It is german and the slogan of Audi Cars Gmbh.