All posts by Stefan Geens

Tutorials

Home-grown Google Earth wlan map

Three weeks ago I marvelled at the audacity of Microsoft mapping wifi access points to their coordinate positions for use with the “Locate me” feature in Virtual Earth. How time flies: Today, jkx@Home posts a do-it-yourself tutorial for creating a Google Earth wlan map. He stitches together Kismet, GPSDrive, MySQL and Python, and does it all in Linux (except for the actual viewing in Google Earth), so it’s a bit geek-infused, but wow.

Content

Google Maps Explorer

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Google Maps Explorer is the latest entry in a now crowded field of sightseeing sites, but this one has some great things going for it: Clean design, clever use of categories for easy navigation, the ability to subscribe to individual categories via RSS feeds, sorting by popularity and date, the ability to view the results of searches and categories on an inline Google Map, and the ability to add comments to existing locations. Very nicely executed! Comes with support for Nasa World Wind, Google Maps and Earth, and MSN Virtual Earth. This will definitely keep the other sightseeing sites on their toes.

Process

Portand Bike trip planner, cont.

Mark Bosworth, who does GIS at Portland’s Metro transportation planning agency, wrote in to clarify this earlier post on plans to integrate a bike trip planner for Portland with Google Earth:

At this point, Google has not responded to my inquiries, so I think it is fair to say that the solution will be to do the routing outside Google, and then display the results in either GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth. We have been talking with them since they were Keyhole Corporation, and hopefully will have a Fusion Server here at Metro to publish our own local data through the GoogleEarth interface. We are an ESRI shop, so we are also thinking of an ArcIMS route solution that would be distributed via a browser based application. Though, given the recent momentum in the open source community – propelled by the Google API – I’m pretty certain that an open solution will appear very soon. Hopefully driven in the Portland region by our better datasets.

Hope this gives you a little insight into what is happening here. I’m really excited by the potential for this type of application, and I think the enthusiastic response we have got from the community for just publishing the linework to LOOK at in GoogleEarth is an indication of how strong a demand there is out there for cyclists to be able to plan their rides, and explore bike routes from the Net.

Reviews

A GIS pro evaluates Google Earth

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Sydneysider Andrew Hallam posts a long and detailed evaluation of Google Earth on his Digital Earth Weblog. He approaches the application from the perspective of a GIS professional contemplating using it for his work. It’ a fascinating and nuanced read, and amounts to some great free feedback/feature requests that Google would be remiss in ignoring.

Andrew is impressed by the network link, however. I wonder why there wasn’t such a thing before in GIS land (is there?) The idea of the network link is great, but it is “just” an XML feed applied to a spatial coordinate system. Wasn’t there ever any need for that before? How did (do) GIS pros deliver oft-updated and even dynamically generated data to a wide set of subscribers?

Process

Client-side map editor on the way

danbri\s foaf stories point us in the direction of some great-looking screenshots of an upcoming open source client-side map editor, MozMapEditor. (It uses XULRunner, so it’s aimed at Firefox et. al.)

ETA is the beginning of September, as per the comment thread. Did I mention it looks great? The mozdev site explains,

Mozmapeditor is based on a new implementation in Mozilla, the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and on an Open GIS Consortium (OGC) standard, the Geography Markup Language (GML).

Danbri hopes the results are exportable to KML, among other formats, and so do I. It shouldn’t be so hard, right?