Links: Minimap, R, Hanke interview, GeoXtract

  • Minimap sidebar for Firefox:

    The Minimap add-on gives you a suite of in-built maps and mapping tools for your web browser. Create and save a sidebar map using the addresses or address links you find on web pages (highlight then drag and drop), or by manually adding locations. View traffic Info, drag and drop kml files, local search, Google, Yahoo and Live Local directions, view in google earth, tagzania, platial, geourl and many more. Address/Location points are stored locally for later use.

    It’s remarkable how sophisticated web mapping tools have become over the past two years.

  • R for geospatial analysis: Screenshots showing visualization of spatial data analysis using the statistics tool R and its maptools package, which can export to KML.
  • Hanke interview: Datamation has an interview with John Hanke. A teaser:

    People can have community sites about specific topics and, with this phenomenon of the long tail, you can have people aggregating around their specific interests and doing annotations around that and sharing them. And if [Google Earth] is going to be viewed as a single map, you need to have a standard so you can search and browse it. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of siloed information. [Hence KML => OGC]

  • New geocoding app: I don’t know how I’ve missed it until now, but GeoXtract by Terra IMS is a standalone Windows geocoding application that takes spreadsheet data and outputs it as a Google Map or KML — to your own website, hosted on GeoXtract.com or to your local hard drive. Here is a gallery of examples. The basic version is free, and Mac support is promised. Very cute Web 2.0 site design to boot. (Via AnyGeo)
  • Nokia N95 mashup? Set your Nokia to take time-lapse photography or video, attach it with duct tape to a kite, and voila, the easiest DIY aerial imagery yet. Until the landing, that is.
  • Multitouch history: Because next year everyone will be surfing Google Earth using multitouch on our iPhone, here’s a overview of the history of multitouch systems by one of the early innovators.
  • KML on iPhone? One blogger and iPhone owner reports being able to load a KML file published to the web in Google Maps on iPhone. Can anyone replicate that feat? By dint of a geographical misfortune, I’m cruelly deprived of iPhones here in Sweden.
  • GPS with Java: Are you a Java developer? Check out gpsdings 0.2, a Java command line tool for extracting GPS data from a GPS receiver.
  • How do you spell relief? Microsoft Virtual Earth 2D maps get shaded relief, reports the Map Room. With hindsight, that’s an obvious improvement for a mapping service, and it looks great.
  • Michael Jones article: Google Earth Blog points to a paper by Google Earth CTO Michael Jones outlining some of the big-picture thinking that’s going on at Google regarding the (geospatial) organization of the world’s information.
  • Dresden in 3D: Google Earth Blog also flags the news that Dresden is now available as a network link of 3D buildings.
  • TITAN does KML: Leica TITAN now “supports the direct publishing and serving of geospatial data to Google Earth,” says an email to registered users, as All Points Blog notes.

3 thoughts on “Links: Minimap, R, Hanke interview, GeoXtract”

  1. KML on iPhone, yup it works! If you type the kml address in the form of http://domainname/x.kml into Maps it will load the kml file as a pin with GPS and the lat/log as the name.

    If you live in a city with buses that have Google Earth kml tracking then you can plan your arrival at the bus stop to coincide with that of the bus!

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