geo2web.com

::: via :::

• Australia, Japan get Street View: Amazing — Australia is now smothered in blue Street View lines in Google Maps — including some of the most out-of-the-way places you can imagine:

  View Larger Map

  

  The Australian’s take: “Privacy advocates say Google’s gone too far,” though not, it turns out, Australia’s Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner, which thinks Google’s approach is fair dinkum enough. Japan too gets some of its main cities covered. Thanks to Claudia Carvalho for the tip.

• Olym-pics not for the Chinese: Google’s recently updated satellite imagery of the brand-new Olympic stadiums in Beijing — which would provide ample opportunity for the Chinese to feel proud — is alas not available to ordinary Chinese, as inside the Great Chinese Firewall Google’s Chinese-language Ditu Maps service does not have a satellite imagery layer. Because, you know, all those domestic terrorists would never dream of using a proxy server to maps.google.com.
• OneGeology outputs to KML: It turns out that OneGeology, previously flagged on Ogle Earth but not tested due to browser limitations, outputs to KML, as Hypocentre points out Now that I’ve had access to IE7 for a bit, I can confirm that the exported view-based network link works great in Google Earth. All Points Blog also lauds the data, but comments that the site’s technical underpinnings is a bit dated. As far as I’m concerned, the KML links for the regional layers serve all my needs — it would be great to offer them as a list of options that don’t depend on a small subset of browsers or the map view — I know where Africa is:-) Oh and a KML layer with the key would make it perfect.

  

• 3DXplorer - new Java-based virtual world: Serendipitously, just a few days after Avi Bar-Zeev clarifies the difference between two different kind of “browser-based” 3D virtual worlds/globes (one kind requires a plugin be installed, the other relies on the browser’s own resources — which is a much harder feat to pull off) an avatar-driven virtual world of the second kind is announced: 3DXplorer. Tantalizingly, it supports COLLADA models of the kind made by SketchUp and found in Google 3D Warehouse. In other words, you can create your own virtual worlds on your own website, populate it with existing 3D content, and let anyone with a free 3DXplorer account visit. That could well be a winning formula, with a free hosting option for low-traffic sites and paid options that are competitive with Second Life, depending on usage patterns. It runs in java 1.6, which alas Apple has been tardy shipping as a default with OS X (it’s still at 1.5). The main constraint, I suspect: It doesn’t look as slick as Second Life.
• Mapufacture + GeoCommons: Geoweb pioneer Mapufacture, with its early support for syndicated georeferenced content via GeoRSS, is being acquired by FortiusOne, which is democratizing access to complex GIS databases via its GeoCommons platform. As Mapufacture’s Mikel Maron, Andrew Turner and FortiusOne’s Sean Gorman explain it, the two services are complementary and hence a perfect fit — Sean Gorman:
  

  The long term vision has been to eventually fuse the personal and dynamic data of the GeoWeb (long tail) [Mapufacture] with the static and statistical data of GIS (short tail) [Geocommons].

  I think it’s wonderful that there is consolidation afoot among the social geoentrepreneurs — there are some very big fish in the geospatial pond.

• Earthmine update: O’Reilly Radar updates us on progress with Earthmine, which is working on an API to integrate its “Street View on steroids” into third party web sites. Don’t know about Earthmine yet? You need to check out this video.
• Landsat to go free: Announced today: 35 years of archived Landsat imagery will be made freely available on the web by the end of 2008. The U.S. Geological Survey will be hosting the data, which is good news — the USGS is an enthusiastic adopter of KML for many of its other projects. Depending on how comprehensively this dataset is integrated with Google Earth et. al., we’ll soon be able to browse the Earth in time as well as in space.

Comments (0)

[Read more →]

::: via :::

Hi. This is Craig Johnston and Brian Hull of Sudjam, LLC, the company hosting and developing the new online presence for the band Nine Inch Nails. This guest blog entry will cover how we went about creating a Google Earth representation of downloads for NIN’s latest album, the slip.

We started out with about the first 1.4 million downloads logged (ironically just a subset of the total downloads), and wanted to end up with a dramatic representation of the data set, suitable for the exacting stylistic demands of NIN. Something along these lines:

We first needed to generate lat/longs, which we did by running the IP addresses logged for each download through the GeoIP^® database. The process yielded a high precision set of locations, yet too many to represent as a single data set in Google Earth (we tried). We solved this by grouping the data into histogram-like bins, which we accomplished simply by dropping the precision of the lat/longs when we retrieved them. This took us down to a more acceptable ~40,000 Placemarks, each with a total number of downloads.

The next step was to represent the data in a dramatic fashion… or in Google Earth terms, extruding a polygon into space in proportion to the total downloads. We accomplished this easily enough, but then also wanted the download totals for each column to be clickable. We used a solution we found in Jason Birch’s blog which involved embedding a point with the polygon section of the Placemark and wrapping them in a MultiGeometry tag, which ended up looking like this:

 <Placemark> <description>17875 downloads.</description> <styleUrl>#base</styleUrl> <MultiGeometry> <Point> <coordinates>-118.2,34.0,0</coordinates> </Point> <Polygon> <extrude>1</extrude> <altitudeMode>relativeToGround</altitudeMode> <outerBoundaryIs> <LinearRing> <coordinates> -118.1,34.1,12512500 -118.3,34.1,12512500 -118.3,33.9,12512500 -118.1,33.9,12512500 -118.1,34.1,12512500 </coordinates> </LinearRing> </outerBoundaryIs> </Polygon> </MultiGeometry> </Placemark>

To avoid the icon clutter, we substituted a 1×1-pixel transparent PNG icon placed in the center of the polygon’s base. Finally, we added in a watermark logo and some instructional text using <ScreenOverlay>, and it was complete. The final result is available for download from the NIN website.

Fans of the band can also follow its upcoming tour directly in Google Earth — their performance page lets you subscribe to tour updates as a KML file, with all the tour stops in sequence and time-tagged. Because the tour data is implemented behind a <NetworkLink>, it’s always up-to-date, even when users save it to their My Places in Google Earth.

We had a lot of fun doing these visualizations, and are grateful to have a client like Trent Reznor who understands and appreciates a cool little side project such as this enough to not only promote it but to put his name behind it. And thanks to Topspin Media for providing the original idea.

Posted by Michael Weiss-Malik, Nine Inch Nails fan

[Read more →]

::: via :::

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.

[Read more →]

::: via :::

Recent Google Maps Developer Event Videos & Pictures:

Google I/O Maps & Geo Sessions:

• The World’s Information in Context Must-see!
• Flash API for Google Maps
• My Maps Editing API
• Hosting your Geo Data, an Overview of Design Options
• Harnessing StreetView, Static Maps, and other new additions to the Google Maps API
• Google Maps: From Mashups to Mapplets
• How to Index your Geo data
• Advanced KML
• Parsing and Generating KML with Google’s KML Library
• Advanced Ruby Scripting for SketchUp

..Check out some delicious panoramas of the Google I/O event from 360Cities.net and be sure check where and when International 2008 Google Developer Days are happening near you!

Google Geo Developer Series:

• Quick & Dirty KML Creation
• Creating Custom Maps
• GigaPan In-Depth
• Dynamic KML
• Mars, Moon, and Sky Map Types
• Mapping the Votes (The making of Elections 2008 Map/Mapplet/Gadget)
• Google API Talks (Android, KML, Google Maps, Gadgets)

[Via this post that contains more info..]

Photos and Videos from other recent Geo Events:

• All Speaker Videos from the 2008 O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference!! - Photos (still more)
• WhereCamp @ The Googleplex - Photos and Video

Google Maps Tools and Creators:

• Intel Mash Maker - Intel enters the web based mashup tool realm with Mash Maker which lets you mash Google Maps with other sites from the web. Take a look at a detailed review here..
• MapDangito lets you syndicate the popular MapDango mashup on your blog/website! (See a live example - right side, down a bit)
• Google Map Maker - Very simple web based Google Maps creator.
• Mapper.ch - A slim, handy app to create maps, POIs and drawings on Google Maps (Multilingual: de, fr, it, en)
• WexZone Mapper - Complete (Google Maps) map management system. (Example sites herehere..)
• Click2Map - Online Maps editor - info found in documentation and http://wiki.click2map.com/doku.php#tutorials section
• GoogleMapBuilder - Lets you create a Google Map using a spreadsheet or text file (Reviewed here..)
• Mapanui - Bookmarklet that searches for an address in the page and maps it.
• Useamap adds static maps for faster loading

Developer Links:

• Generate KML with Google Spreadsheets
• Google Earth for Browser Mashup with ArcGIS JavaScript
• Google Maps Collaboration Using Google’s New ActionScript API, Flex, and BlazeDSa>
• Google Maps timeline mashup examples here and here..
• Google Calendar + Maps mashup example (View source code)
• Check out heaps of Google Maps API examples in the Google Maps API Demo Gallery!
• Perl CPAN module: HTML::GoogleMaps - a simple wrapper around the Google Maps APIa>
• Perl CPAN module: HTML::GMap - Generic framework for building Google Maps displays[Thanks to Amos Shapira!]

Don’t forget that the Google Maps API Blog has been retired and is now the Google Geo Developers Blog!
________________

[Read more →]

::: via :::

Want to see some very inspiring, imaginative presentations in Google Earth? Look no further than the Google Earth Outreach Showcase. The KML on these pages are created by people who are literally trying to change the world by raising awareness of important global and local issues.

Close to my home, I am particularly fond of the California’s Marine Protected Areas KML, which makes clever use of polylines, image overlays and attractive HTML placemark balloons to describe the beauty and importance of these coastal areas within a geographical context.

[Read more →]

::: via :::

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs team

By now, many of you have heard about the new Google Earth API that we announced Wednesday during Google I/O. It’s exciting that you can now enjoy the 3D Google Earth experience in the browser, and you can create your own custom interactive apps on top of it. This new API lets you use JavaScript to programmatically interact with the Earth browser, changing camera views, loading KML or 3D models, or even creating KML objects from scratch.

Here’s your basic “Hello Earth” app:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /><head><title>Hello Google Earth!</title><!-- *** Replace the key below below with your own API key, available at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html *** --><script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=abcd"></script><script>google.load("earth", "1");

var ge = null;

function init() { google.earth.createInstance("map3d", initCallback, failureCallback);}

function initCallback(object) { ge = object; ge.getWindow().setVisibility(true);}

function failureCallback(object) { // Gracefully handle failure.}</script></head>

<body onload='init()' id='body'><center> <div> Hello, Earth! </div>

 <div id='map3d_container' style='border: 1px solid silver; height: 600px; width: 800px;'> <div id='map3d' style='height: 100%;'></div> </div></center>

</body></html>

And, if you’re already a Google Maps API developer, adding Google Earth to your mashup is really easy. Just add the following line:

 map.addMapType(G_SATELLITE_3D_MAP);

To view apps written in the Earth API, you will have to download a browser plug-in. Currently, the plug-in is Windows only, and works on Mozilla and Internet Explorer based browsers, including Firefox. We are working to expand the number of browsers, and have announced Mac and Linux plug-ins will be released in August.

Check out the cool sample apps. If you have any questions or come across any problems, post them in our Earth API developer group.

[Read more →]

For a recent project I was working on, I needed to overlay lines of latitude and longitude on the map. I had a hard time finding some so I created 10 degree and 30 degree grids. Below you can view each of them as a Collection which you can export to KML, GeoRSS or GPX and you can also grab the exported KML for each. I figured someone else must have use for this as well. If you grab the KML files you can easily edit the styles (1 for latitude, 1 for longitude) or make whatever tweaks you need.

10 Degree Lines: Collection or KML

30 Degree Lines: Collection or KML

[Read more →]

::: via :::

Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is starting to become a de facto standard for transmitting spatial data. Both Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth have added support for viewing KML data. In both of these cases, it is necessary to make the KML file available on the web so that Google and/or Microsoft can access the file and process it to be viewed in their map controls.

Google Map’s, as you might imagine, is getting much better at displaying KML on their web map. The example below shows a KML file (created by Shape2Earth) showing the total number of households by state.

First in Google Map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://shape2earth.com/Documents/states_NumHouseholds.kml

Then in Virtual Earth.

http://maps.live.com/?mapurl=http://shape2earth.com/Documents/states_NumHouseholds.kml

Note how the geometries in Virtual Earth do not line up very well, and in some cases, are not visible at all. Virtual Earth also seems to automatically add a center point, and does not adhere to the KML coloring scheme. If you switch to 3D mode, the geometries will line up much better, but the fill color seems to be absent.

It looks like any investments that you might be making in KML converters are going to be beneficial for some time to come.

[Read more →]

Posted by Gregor J. Rothfuss, Maps Team
KML is being widely adopted by applications like Mapufacture, ESRI ArcGIS, Yahoo Pipes, NASA WorldWind, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Maps Mobile, Flickr and Platial. It’s now more important than ever to make sure that your KML files are compliant with the KML standards. [...]

[Read more →]