Canada’s Ambercore, “the leading global provider of high performance spatial decision support systems,” has released version 2.5.1 of Amber iQ, which looks extremely fancy, and which now for the first time also exports Google Earth’s KML. There is a free trial download, but they’re not volunteering prices, so you probably can’t afford it anyway:-)
I’ve never heard of Ambercore before, but that’s because I’m no GIS pro. What I do know is that there is a definite trend by pro GIS software vendors to accommodate KML. It means Google Earth is becoming the default free viewer for spatial information.
It seems Geoblogger’s Rev Dan Catt just couldn’t resist the temptation, so now we have Google Maps tiles in Google Earth, courtesy of some extremely cool hacking. Definitely worth checking out. (Don’t forget to play with altitudes. Unfortunately, this one just proves too much for VirtualPC for me to obtain a screenshot of San Francisco with my Mac.)
[Update 10:02 UTC: Wow. It seems like the good Rev may have been beaten to it by Germany’s Bernhard Sterzbach (not that it’s a competition or anything:-). Here is his Google Maps overlay. I’m in no position to judge their relative merits. BTW, as if any more justification for this hack is needed, Bernhard points out: “When I was entering placemarks for my recent holiday in Japan I noticed that Google Earth resolution (outside Tokyo) is fairly limited but Google Maps shows all of Japan with excellent detail.” (Brought to my attention via LammiaGazza, who has screenshots.)]
For the German speakers amongst us, TerraGoo is a new blog in Google Earth orbit, covering mapping technologies and marketing from the perspective of local regional governments in Germany.
Directions Magazine has a great big-picture article, Spatial Information Management (SIM) – Then, Now, Next, which provides a potted history of GIS that puts the current technological rapids in context. Among the gems:
First, information technology always evolves toward the way that people think and act. Location is a fundamental part of the way we think and act.
I too have wondered why it took so long for web information to finally start reorganizing itself along geographic lines. I suspect the URL, and the location-free dimension it inhabits, is soon going to be thoroughly linked to coordinate pairs, not least by Google Earth/Maps and the swarm of social mapping applications that it is breeding.
My only problem with reporting on Mapdex is that I already used superlatives describing them last time, so I am a little at a loss for words for the three posts they published today. Just the facts, then:
Mapdex publishes the code for converting ArcIMS to KML (using Cold Fusion).
And the clincher, Mapdex is now fully integrated with Google Earth. Every layer and service; even WMS layers. There are even unexpected bonuses, like pretty icons, displays of raw metadata for services, and a history page, so “you can see how a mapservice has evolved over time.”
Taking inspiration from the online volunteers, Google, NASA and Carnegie Mellon University had by Saturday night made the effort more formal, incorporating nearly 4,000 posthurricane images into the Google Earth database (at www.earth.google.com) for public use.
“It was 100 percent a reaction to what they were doing,” John Hanke, a general manager who is in charge of the Google Earth service, said on Sunday. “They knew about the NOAA data before Google did.”