KML | Mapsys.info

Google Maps Mashups 16

They Draw & Travel – World Map

They Draw & Travel is a collection of wonderful user submitted hand drawn maps.

The World Map lets you browse the maps submitted to They Draw & Travel on Google Maps. You can click on any of the map markers and view the hand drawn map submitted for that location.

One Day on Earth

On 10.10.10 One Day on Earth asked people around the world to create a video of their world. The goal of the project was to “create an open shareable archive and documentary film of the world on 10/10/10.”

You can browse and watch the thousands of videos that were contributed around the world on this Google Map.

#rorschmap

I only found this map yesterday and it has already become a firm favourite.

#rorschmap uses the Google Maps API to create a kaleidoscope for any location on the Earth. Essentially the application displays the Google Maps satellite view of a location and, using the same principle of multiple reflection that you find in kaleidoscopes, creates an animated Rorschach test effect.

Great British Picnics

The Guardian newspaper is increasingly working with partners to produce useful Google Map based guides. The newspaper are collaborating with lastminute.com to create their City Guides. They have also worked with Enjoy England to create a Google Map based guide to great destinations in the UK.

The Guardian has now partnered with Country Life Butter to create a Google Maps guide to great picnic spots in the UK.

The map helps you search for a picnic spot by activity, for example spots that are good for hikers, photographers or wildlife fans. You can also search by environment, such as by beach, riverside or country park.

If you have a favourite picnic spot of your own you can add it to the map.

Maersk Fleet – Live Map

This Google Map allows you to track in real-time the the huge shipping containers of Maersk as they travel around the world.

The position of the ships are displayed live on this Google Map. You can click on any of the ship map markers to view a photograph of the ship and read further details, such as the ship’s destination and current speed.

This map presumably uses the Automatic Identification System (AIS), an automated tracking system used on ships to plot real-time positions.

Integrate Google Maps and Flickr into a Real-Time App

.net magazine has published a great tutorial on how to create a real-time animated Flickr map. The tutorial was written by James Christian and Ben Gannaway the creators of the excellent Net-a-Porter Live Google Map.

The tutorial explains how to create a Google Map that animates in near real-time through images posted on Flickr. The tutorial includes how to work with the Flickr API and how to customise the look of your map.

Alongside the tutorial is a demo map and a link to download the full source code.

Rendezview

Yellow Pages in Canada has released a useful application to help two or more people find the best place to meet.

To find a place to meet you need to enter your address and the address of the person you plan to meet. You can then select the type of venue where you wish to meet, for example a restaurant, a bar or a cafe.

Rendezview will then create a Google Map showing you the most convenient venues that you could meet (based on your selected preferences), roughly half-way between the two locations.

Japanese Castle Explorer

Daniel O’Grady’s excellent Japanese Castle Explorer has been updated to take advantage of all the new wonderful Street View imagery available for Japan.

This year the Street View trike has been very busy in Japan capturing a lot of beautiful new off-road imagery, particular in the grounds of some of Japan’s castles.

The Japanese Castle Explorer is a great map that shows the locations of Japan’s most famous (and plenty of lesser known) castles. The map allows you to view Japan’s castles in Google Maps satellite view. Now it is also possible, where available, to view the castles in Street View.

The map is available in English and Japanese versions. You can view an example of the Street View at Himeji Castle (use the link to ‘Other Castle Panoramas’ in the sidebar to navigate to view other castles in Street View).

The Bath Schools Map

The Bath Schools Map is designed to help parents choosing schools in Bath, in the UK, by displaying local schools and admissions and performance data on Google Maps.

In Bath parents are only allowed to indicate 3 schools as a preference for their children. Using the map it is possible to find the nearest ten schools and compare their academic mini-league tables on a range of metrics with a sidebar. This helps parents make school choices from a broad base of information rather than gearing towards a single metric.

GeoBus
Geobus is a nice little app that can find the nearest bus-stops for any location in the UK. Just enter a postcode or use the ‘locate me’ button and the nearest bus-stops to your current location will be displayed on a Google Map.

The application was developed as part of the recent Young Rewired State initiative.

England’s Health Data Map

The Guardian has used Fusion Tables to map the latest Health Profiles data from the Department of Health and the Public Health Observatories.

Using the Google Map it is possible to compare a number of health indicators for regions in the UK. For example, it is possible to view child obesity throughout the UK or view where the most people die from smoking.

There are still quite a lot of gaps in Street View’s coverage around the world. Luckily a number of other providers have created their own Google Maps based Street View applications to try and plug these gaps.

China – with City8

In China City8 have created extensive interactive 360 degree panoramas in 45 of the country’s biggest cities.

MapJack

As well as providing Street View type imagery in the USA, Canada, Singapore and Sweden Mapjack has also ventured where Google Street View has so far feared to tread. MapJack has great coverage in Malaysia, Thailand and Puerto Rico.

Norc

Norc has great coverage in central and eastern Europe, including in Poland and Austria, where Google’s Street View cars have yet to drive.

via:goglemapsmania

Share|

3 Crime Maps: Point collation

Quick update of the Placemark Clustering project: we’ll be doing user tests using the uk police crime map later this summer (discussed below) comparing it to a chloropleth grid (translation = head map based on grid, I explain further here)

In thinking about this I’ve hunted down some examples and I thought it would be interesting to name check 3.

No Collation: The first map is Oakland Crime Spotting (bottom inset in figure) that is very similar to San Francisco Crime mapping, reviewed here. Unlike the other two maps it attempts no point collation at all, I image the authors would argue that they deal with the problem by providing sophisticated filtering tools to reduce the point density. However, it doesn’t help if the user wants to get an overview picture of crime across the area the map covers.

Traditional Choropleth: Switching to the the UK, the Metropolitan Police (=London for non UK readers) offer a choropleth map based on wards and subwards (top left insert). I regard this as the traditional approach. Notably it doesn’t show actual figures for postcodes, only sub wards – a sub ward is a collection of postcodes. My problem with this is that almost no one knows the boundaries of wards and sub wards so its a strange way to split the city up. (Aside: in my experience, Londoners tend to split London up based on tube stations)

Point Collation: The UK police offer a national map which uses point collation (top right insert). This is the main one we’re planning to test as IMHO it isn’t an effective way to visualise the data (related post). It offers a finer grain of data – you don’t actually see the true location of the crime but it is collated down to the postcode level. In London, a postcode is roughly equal to a single street.

Share|

Google Maps Masups 14

Loughborough University Campus Map

Loughborough University’s campus map is a great example of how to use the Google Maps API to help students and visitors find their way around a large campus.

The map uses the custom overlays function to overlay a custom map of the university on top of the Google Map. The custom map overlay includes features and locations that are not on Google Map’s own map tiles, such as trees, tennis courts, football pitches etc.

The map also makes good use of polygons to make buildings on the map interactive. If you click on any of the buildings you can view the building’s name, a photo of the building and links to its page on the university’s website.

Finally, the map includes a very nice search facility that allows you to search for a building or feature by name or by category.

Greenpeace – Moscow Recycling Map

Greenpeace has released a Google Map of recycling stations in Moscow.

The map shows the locations of recycling stations for paper, glass, plastic bottles, old electronics and clothing in the Russian capital. The map includes custom made markers that are colour coordinated to indicate the type of recycling possible at each station.

It is also possible for users to add the location of missing recycling locations to the map.

Google Hotel Finder

Google has today launched Hotel Finder, a new search tool to help you find a hotel.

The tool includes an interesting Google Maps interface that allows you to search for hotels by location. When you enter a location into the Hotel Finder the map shows an initial shape based on the most popular area for visitors to stay. Users can drag the shape to define more closely this area, e.g. close to the ocean or along Sunset Boulevard.

Hotel Finder also shines a “tourist spotlight” on the most visited areas in the selected city. Tools in the sidebar allow you to adjust the price of hotels you wish to view on the map and to compare the current price to the hotel’s typical price.

Livebookings Live Map

Online clothes retailer Zappos started a trend when they created their live Zappos Map. This real-time map was created to show the latest orders placed on Zappos live on a Google Map.

The Zappos Map was quickly followed by Net-a-Porter Live, ThisNext and The Book Depository Live. Now Livebookings, Europe’s largest online booking service for restaurants, has released a live map of restaurant tables booked by its customers.

Livebookings Live takes the reservations coming in, removes the customers’ names, and plots them on a map showing where, for how many, and with what frequency the Livebookings system is used.

Geohashing Wiki

The xkcd Geohashing Wiki is inviting you to participate in the wonderful world of random location meet-ups.

Geohashing is a method for finding a random location near your current location and then visiting it. Every day the geohashing algorithm generates a new set of coordinates for your location. Everyone in a given region gets the same set of coordinates.

After you have visited the random location you can document your expedition on the Geohashing Wiki, including details of who was involved in your expedition and pictures of your adventure.

To get your daily randomised coordinates visit the Geohashing Google Map. Click on the map to show your location and, using the geohashing algorithm, your random location will be generated by the map.

Zoopla: UK Property Heat Map

Real-estate website Zoopla has created a heat-map of UK property prices.

The Google Map provides a quick overview of where properties are affordable and where houses are more expensive. For example if you zoom in on London, you can see a distinct pattern of expensive property in the commuter belt around the capital.

World Tour Schedules on Google Maps

Artist / DJ Richie Hawtin has created a gorgeous looking Google Map for his current world tour. Custom map tiles have been used to give the map a distinct design. The dot-matix look of the design is continued in the custom made map markers and information windows.

Dates on the tour are displayed on the map and a slide-out sidebar shows the dates in list form.

The ‘One City’ world tour continues until December.

Share|

Google Earth: The Flooding in London

He’s back now with an updated file that generates some slick animations to fly you to London and to animate the rising water. Try it yourself with this KMZ file.

Making it even better is all of the additional 3D buildings that have been added to London this year, making things look much more realistic and helping to show the depth of the water.

Share|

How to use Google Earth as a source of geocoding!

I would like to share with you simple hint – How to use Google Earth as a geocoding tool.
You should have list with addresses and names of the points in Microsoft Exel file.

.KML format have couple of structures and one of them is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.1">
<Document>
<Folder>
<name>
</name>
<Placemark>
<name>
</name>
<visibility>0</visibility>
<address><![CDATA[    ]]></address>
</Placemark>
</Folder>
</Document>
</kml>

So we should take the name of the point and the address and we are putting it in this frame structure.
To do this we have to create simple macro which will create .KML file with the names and the addresses from our Microsoft Excel file.

Sub generateKML()
'
' GenerateKML Macro
' Macro recorded 27/02/2010 by ipt
'

    ' Set file details
    Set filePath = [File_details!C2]

    ' Set document name
    Set docName = [File_details!C3]

    Open filePath For Output As #1

    'Write header to file
    outputText = [File_details!C5] & docName & [File_details!C6]
    Print #1, outputText

    'Start to loop through stations
    For Each cell In [Data!A2.A50001]

        pmName = cell.Offset(0, 0)
        pmAddress = cell.Offset(0, 1)

        If pmName = "" Then
           Exit For
        End If

        'Create a placemark
        outputText = [File_details!C8] & pmName & [File_details!C9] & pmAddress & [File_details!C10]
        Print #1, outputText

    Next

   'Write footer to file
    outputText = [File_details!C12]
    Print #1, outputText

    Close #1

'
End Sub

We are creating two sheets – Sheet “data” – is where we have to paste the names and the addresses
The second Sheet is called “File_Details” and in this sheet we should describe the structure of the .KML file.
We are describing output file name and directory also.
The macro will Loop thru the record set from “Data” Sheet and it should Save data as .KML file.
When you open the file with Google Earth it will start geocoding. For approximately 2500 POI – raw addresses with removed fullstops it took 30 minutes to geocode
1875 POI’s

To get the geocoded data you have save your file as .KML from Google Earth in specific directory.
After that you opening saved file with Microsoft Excel.
Microsoft Excel will ask you to open this file as an .xml table(picture)

And opening the file you should see something like: