Mapdex is sitting on a goldmine — it’s an index of freely available map servers, making it a tremendous resource for the GIS community (especially students). Now Mapdex blog reports
that ArcIMS servers returned in a search are getting KML links, so that the data can be accessed seamlessly in Google Earth.
This makes Mapdex a sort of Google for GIS data searches.
Google Maps Mania links to a really fine mashup with Google Earth support: Occultation Maps for North America for asteroids.
Asteroidal occultations are like miniature solar eclipses, except it’s with a star instead of the sun and an asteroid instead of the moon. Click on a link to view the paths where the occultations are visible; from there you can download the KML for Google Earth.
Zmarties posts a Google Earth layer that links each country to a wealth of information on the web. Simple, but very effective. It’s tools like these that encourage the use of Google Earth as a first recourse for web-based information gathering.
Brian Flood gets specific about using Google Earth as a viewer of ArcGIS-served data.
He also points at a slew of KML layers for Portland, released by PortlandMaps.com. What is it about Portland and Google Earth?
Erwin at GoogleGlobe writes in to point out two new features they’ve gone live with. On their main page, you can now type in a city name and have Google Earth fly you there. Interestingly, if multiple cities are found, you get to see them all.
And on www.globeassistant.com, you can now create your “Personal Globe Assistant“, a network link stuffed with different geopositioned info feeds that you get to select. The news ones look very useful, and this is certainly an easy way subscribe to them. Getting a personal globe assistant does require your email, however, as the file is sent to you.
Tulsa NWS’s KML files are back up, this time on a page that expunges all mention of Google Earth, and which goes to great pains to point out that KML is a kind of XML, with a link to NWS’s XML policy. LOL.