Adding location metadata to photos is perhaps the surprise hit of 2005’s mass mapping revolution, bestowing immediate benefits in terms of context and display options. For many people using Flickr or similar tools, coming across geotagged, mapped photos may well have been their first conscious encounter with GIS.

Two new tools are helping to forge the connection between a photograph and where it was taken. Both integrate with Google Earth.

ITag

For Windows users, ITag turns adding location metadata into a matter of dragging and dropping a Google Earth placemark onto the photograph. This data can then be saved in a Flickr-compatible format for uploading to that service, or else one or more photographs can exported in a group as a KMZ file and sent to people for opening in Google Earth. (example (KMZ))

Finally, ITag will also convert GPX tracklogs made by GPS devices into KML. It’s free, so there is no reason not to try it, in case this is what you need.

Photo Map

This open source project is an elaborate Firefox browser extension. The aim is “to build a better map” by tagging (panoramic) photos in Flickr or 23 with more detailed metadata (point of view, type, season, time of day…) and then displaying them on Google Local as an enhanced map. You can also launch Google Earth from the interface with a network link that shows the photographs in that context.

The project is in its incipient phase, in need of (your?) content, but it is even worth playing with just as a proof of concept.

> Earthbooker.com, which lets you use Google Earth find hotels, has a press release out touting its increasing popularity. The site gets an average of 1 million page views a day, according to the press release, though it’s not clear if this number includes refreshes of its network links. The company behind Earthbooker, GlobeAssistant, continues to refer to a “patented technique” for the coding delivering its network links — considering the time it takes to get an actual patent, I suspect that is more marketingese than a term of art. If it isn’t I’d love to find a reference (I have looked).

> A $40 GPS logger that outputs to a KML file on an SD memory card, via Make blog. Unfortunately, it’s $75 short of actually working. I want this in my next iPod.

> Tim Beerman of Interactive Earth walks us through the minutiae of building an open-source Shapefile-to-KML converter.

Instead of waiting for Google to come out with the time browser, developers at Creare Inc have made their own prototype, the “TimeDrive“. The trick is to split up a large set of data into time-delimited slices, and then let you decide via a control panel on a separate website which slice is sent to a constantly updating network link in your Google Earth. The prototype uses Declan’s avian flu dataset, and it works as advertised. Very innovative indeed.

Matt Miller at Creare says their solution can be applied on demand to KML documents that contain time data; TimeDrive will even aggregate multiple documents. But the best may be yet to come:

We also are working on TimeDrive interfaces to recorded webcam image overlays, e.g. fly-through actual imagery of Times Square in both time and space.

(Via Declan’s Connotea GIS bookmarks)

Sorry about the cheesy headline, but when a mining company decides to publicize a gold find by putting all the relevant GIS data into Google Earth, that’s what you do.

Kimber Resources is a gold and silver mining company in the Mexican Sierra Madre, and drill results on their Monterde property have indeed returned gold. (Witness the hike in their share price today). Here is the page with screenshots and the KMZ link, and here are some I made myself:

Click on individual icons to get drill results for that spot. Now, you no longer need to rely on the company’s own conclusions about the viability of a site — make up your own mind from the raw data.

Previously, Brian Timoney has helped companies visualize their geospatial data in Google Earth, notably with Jonah Gas. Kimber’s efforts are very much in the same vein (terrible pun intended). Do two instances make a trend in corporate communications? My guess is that soon, companies which don’t offer this level of granularity in their data to investors are going to be penalized for their opacity to the market.

Nature reporter Declan Butler, who beta-tested Arc2Earth, shows off some of the projects he built using the application. They include the much-lauded avian flu map, which Declan writes will get an update once he’s done with his day job:-)

H5N1 has reached Sweden in the meantime. The birds were found in a very specific area — in an inlet near the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant, conveniently in high res in Google Earth and pre-cordoned off. I’m sure it won’t be the last case, though.

In anticipation of the release of Arc2Earth, I asked Brian Flood about his take on KML, Google Earth, the relative strengths and weaknesses of both, Arc2Earth’s features and what’s in store for the future.

Ogle Earth: Just quickly, how did you get involved in GIS and what is your day job?

Brian Flood: I work at Spatial Data Logic (Somerset, NJ), a company I helped start several years ago. We provide workflow and GIS software for local governments throughout the state.

OE: Arc2Earth takes the output of the most popular GIS analytical tool and puts it into the most popular GIS browser. When did you first see this as an obvious market niche in need of filling?

Continue reading Interview with Arc2Earth’s Brian Flood →

Your Google Earth experience is about to become a whole lot richer, because Brian Flood and his team have just released Arc2Earth, a powerful conversion tool linking one of the main cartographic authoring applications, ESRI’s ArcMap, to Google Earth.

If you’re a user of Google Earth, sit back and wait while GIS pros suddenly find it much easier to start publishing all manner of interesting data to Google Earth. If you want to see some eyecandy, check out what Arc2Earth can do, or open up this teaser KMZ file of 3D nodes of Yellowstone Park (turn off “Terrain” in Google Earth for best results, as the source for height data is the same).

If you are a GIS pro and use ESRI’s ArcMap, then Arc2Earth is going to make your life a lot easier if you need to publish to a free, widely available geobrowser — Google Earth. Arc2Earth comes in a $99 standard version and a $299 professional version which adds TIN export, the opening of network links and, in the future, publishing to a server. There is also an API in the works.

To find out exactly what each version can do, check out the feature list, or else dive right into the manual.

Next up, an interview with Brian Flood about Arc2Earth.