geo2web.com

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Curious how KML elements appear in Google Maps? Take a look at this sample file. Check any item to display it or click a link to zoom in. Google Maps supports a subset of KML features, as described in the KML documentation. Of course, you can view a KML sample in Earth as well.

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A few quick map and map-related gems to share with you:

• Claire showcases another collection of map tattoos.
• Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps: Mark Simonson notes that the maps used in the Indiana Jones movies are anachronistic.
• Presenting the annoying (and quite likely offensive) Sat Nag: “Press the button on the front and a very well-recorded, patronising woman’s voice will come out with one of a host of hysterical Sat Nav-type commands.” Oh dear. Via Gizmodo.
• Modern Mechanix: Blind Get Fair Map Printed in Braille, from the October 1939 issue of Popular Science.
• Boing Boing has a hand-drawn 1955 map of New Jersey’s prisons.
• A replica of Paris built from refuse. Also via Boing Boing.
• A 150-year-old map of New York’s Central Park was on display last week. Maybe I should have told you sooner. Via MapHist and GeoCarta.

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La Cartoteca points to two GIS manuals from the Pragmatic Programmers: Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers: Adding “Where” to your Web Applications, which came out last October; and the forthcoming (an online beta is available) Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools, by Gary E. Sherman.

Jeff Thurston reviews Analyzing Urban Poverty: GIS for the Developing World, by Rosario Giusti de Pérez and Ramón Pérez and published by ESRI Press.

• Buy Analyzing Urban Poverty at Amazon.com
• Buy Desktop GIS at Amazon.com
• Buy GIS for Web Developers at Amazon.com

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Imaginary Coordinates, a controversial exhibition that juxtaposed contemporary Israeli and Palestinian art with antique maps of the region, has been closed prematurely by the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, which had been putting on the show as part of Chicago’s Festival of Maps. It had originally been scheduled through September, and has already been closed and reopened to change the lighting and the language of some labels. Critics charged that parts of the show were anti-Israel, which put the Jewish museum in an uncomfortable spot.

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The problem with the ABC News article entitled “Will GPS Make Us Dumb?” is that it makes a false juxtaposition: map-reading skills with navigation devices’ turn-by-turn directions:

“One effect of an increased dependence on GPS will be that peoples’ ability to read maps will further decay,” [Middlebury College geography professor Anne] Knowles said. “Americans are generally poor map readers. Some cannot read maps at all because it’s not part of our education.

“But what will grow, instead, will be better geographic imagination and awareness. People will see the connections between places more clearly — not quite as accurately — but will better imagine how to get from one place to another because of this technology.”

People have been giving one another directions — verbally, written out turn-by-turn, or in crude hand-drawn maps — for approximately forever; a GPS navigation system is not exactly a new paradigm. It simply allows for geographical awareness without cartographic literacy — in that sense, the analogy with spell-checking is apt, but not in the way that the article’s author expects: spell-checking doesn’t make you less literate; it removes the requirement for you to be more literate. Ditto here: GPS isn’t making us dumb; it’s making it easier for us to stay dumb.

Via GeoCarta.

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• MetaCarta has a blog. “As you can tell by its name, this is a corporate sponsored blog. That said, the goal of the blog is to open up discussion on a wide-range of geography-related issues — not to be a PR mouthpiece for MetaCarta.” Via GeoCarta.
• Y! Geo is a new blog about Yahoo’s geo technologies; it replaces the mapping side of the now-defunct Yahoo Local and Maps blog. (Foolish to nuke the previous blog and all its archives, though.) See also James.
• Her Majesty of Maps abdicates.

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A few weeks ago, we launched two layers on maps.google.com, accessible via the “More..” button. The photos layer displays Panoramio photos, continuously loading in more photos as you zoom in, and letting you click the photos to see the info window with more information. Behind the scenes, the implementation is basically a GTileLayerOverlay plus array of pixel bounds specifying the clickable areas. It’s a clever technique that can be used whenever you have vast amounts of potentially clickable data, and a server that can render out tiles. However, I’m here today to show you how to create a similar effect using MarkerManager plus Panoramio’s API.

The Panoramio API lets you specify a bounding box query, sort by popularity, and output its data in JSON format. The MarkerManager lets you specify marker batches per zoom level ranges, and only displays the markers for the current viewport. Using these features, we can then do the following:

1. Create an empty MarkerManager.
2. Create an empty hash table to store photo ids.
3. Assign a listener to the map “moveend” event. This function calls the Panoramio API, sends in the current bounding box, and asks for the 10 most popular photos. The query looks like this:

   http://www.panoramio.com/map/get_panoramas.php?order=popularity&set=public&from=0&to=10&minx=-124.29382324218749&miny=36.089060460282006&maxx=-119.8773193359375&maxy=38.724090458956965&callback=MyCallback

4. When the query responds, iterate through the results, and for each result whose ID isn’t already in the hash table, add it to the MarkerManager for the current zoom level, and add it to the hash table.

The effect to the user is that additional photos stream in and populate the map as they zoom in - check it out below or here. You can use this technique whenever you have a database that can be queried by bounding box and rank the results.

But if you want to just put a Panoramio button on your site, you can copy the code & scripts from this example. If you’re a Panoramio user yourself, you can actually restrict the layer to only your photos by passing in your user ID to the API call. Developer Ade is experimenting with this on his ibizaA-Z site in order to just display his Ibiza photos.

Link to PanoramioLayer example

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

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Michael Jones discusses geographical context and Google’s objectives in this fascinating presentation:

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MAPme.com - A Community Based Mapping Project

MAPme.com a social mapping site which allows everyone from travelers to special interest groups to create and contribute locations by suggesting ‘Hotspots’ and other information that other members of a map might be interested in.

Filters include ‘weirdness’ - in this case the ‘Dancing Elvis Troupe‘ in Tokyo

These travel guides are community maps where other members can leave comments or photos or even submit their own locations. Usually, these suggestions will either be added directly to each map, or they go into a moderation queue assigned to the map owner (depending on the type of map).

“Each map is like a new post in a geographic forum”, says John McCann, who managed the development of the site. “We have given the map owners as much flexibility as they could ever need in terms of being able to moderate location data, but we’ve also allowed for options for public and personal maps – public maps are generally a free for all, and personal maps are for mostly private use”.

Global Development
The development of the MAPME project took around 6 months, and was achieved on a shoestring budget by outsourcing work to all corners of the globe. Programmers working in the UK, Philippines, The Russian Federation and Australia patched together the MAPME application using open source software including the CAKE rapid development framework and of course the Google Maps API

Complexness
According to Robin Metcalfe- the lead developer of the project, the most complex undertaking was getting the permissions system right, and working out how to allow users to effectively explore a map that might have 500 or 500,000 markers. “We don’t have a map with 500, or even 5000 Hotspots on it yet, but I think our system can handle it”.

Community Mapping
While community mapping is relatively new concept and something that hasn’t really taken the online world by storm (yet), MAPme.com is also excellent for creating travel or city guides that are useful in their own right. Take for example this guide to Cebu, in the Philippines;

http://www.mapme.com/map/cebu

Future Applications
Apparently a Facebook Application, and Map Widget (built in Flash) are on the way, but for the time being map in can be exported in GPX format (easily transferable to portable GPS devices) or by KML. You can even keep an eye on any map activity by subscribing to the RSS channel for each guide.

MAPme is a great looking new site in the ilk of Flagr.com and Platial.com but on a global scale which is easier to use and better to look at. With the addition of an exportable map widget, this could easily be the best web 2.0 community mapping site on the net.

Map your World at http://www.mapme.com

Overall there is a lot of content already and subject matter that might call for some over 18’s certification but on the whole the site works well with the sense of being part of a geo-community mapping project.

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Posted by Brittany Bohnet, Google Maps Special Projects

If you’ve been following politics (or our blog) closely this year, you may have seen some Google Maps mashups from the Iowa Caucus, Super Tuesday, and the US state primaries–including an extra special primary map in Pennsylvania. We’ve recently discovered several other elections map mashups on the web that are just as interesting and we couldn’t help but share.

In order to better showcase these maps to you, we’ve created a Google Maps Elections Gallery that will serve as a collection of the best political maps mashups during the US campaign season. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s inside:

• Primary Results: Take a look back in time as you view the final outcome of the United States primaries. Check results down to the county level and measure how close the final votes were between democratic candidates Clinton and Obama.

• Fundrace: The Huffington Post brings you a map that tracks campaign donors by party, candidate, and location. Already have the Earth API plug-in installed? Try switching on the Earth mode for an even richer experience!

• Twitter: Use the Twitter map to discover what people around the world are saying about the US elections.

• Obama’s Journey/McCain’s Journey: Follow Obama and McCain’s lives, as written by Wikipedia. Whose will lead to the White House?

• Search Queries: Can search queries predict the elections? View the most popular candidate queries around the United States and discover historical trends up to six months back.

• Campaign Trail: A one-stop shop that showcases each candidate’s next campaign stop.

Whether you’re a citizen journalist, online news producer, or just love staying on top of the political news, you now have the opportunity to further engage yourself (and your readers) with the 2008 elections by adding any of these maps to your site.

To get the embeddable code for these maps, click the “Embed this map” link on any of the gallery pages. You will be taken to a new page where you can customize the size, title, and border of the map. Once you are happy with the parameters you’ve set, click on the “Get the Code” button and simply copy/paste the source code into the HTML of your website — it’s as simple as that.

Are you a developer? Browse through our getting started guide to view a list of free open source political content on the web. Use this content to come up with an elections mashup of your own. Once you’re finished building, let us help you show it off to the world by submitting your map back to us at elections@google.com.

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We are currently in Manchester for the 4th International Conference on e-Social Science, running for three days the conference covers a number of subjects relevant to the blog.
I’m presenting a paper entitled ‘Agent-Based Geospatial Simulation: Techniques, Tools and Advances in Three-Dimensional Visualisation‘, for those interested the abstract is below.

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Firefox 3 released
update 17/06/2008 Firefox 3 is now available to download (if you download today you contribute to a world record -hopefully)

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/?p=downloadday

Firefox 3 - Pledge Map


*Map current on Monday 16th June 5pm GMT.

Firefox 3 is due for release on 17th June 2008. They are attempting to break a new world record for the highest amount of downloads with a 24 hour period.
The current pledges are 1,358,652 and counting - expect the actual amount to be a lot higher.

For a full rundown of what is new and/or improved go to the Field Guide
http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/06/12/655/

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