Exploring the world of free tools for GIS, GPS, Google Earth, neogeography, and more.
As a followup to yesterday’s post on the updates at “Hey What’s That”, I was going to post today about a pair of Google Mapplets created by Michael Kosowsky that allowed you to lay contour profiles on any Google Map, and also create terrain profiles. But Ogle Earth beat me to it; no use re-inventing the wheel. One minor correction: the preferred addresses for the mapplets are:
http://www.heywhatsthat.com/mapplets/contours.xml
and
Webware posts advance info about Earthmine, a street-view urban imagery system similar to Google Street View, but with some advanced features. Earthmine uses still photography instead of video, so the image quality is supposedly higher than that of Google Street View. More interestingly, they’re combining the image data with laser range finding to both correct perspective views and provide location data for the objects in the photos. Privacy concerns will be addressed by automatic blurring of features like faces and license plates. The mapping service will be sold commercially, but a consumer-friendly portal will supposedly launch later this summer. Other street view services linked to in the article are Microsoft’s Live Search Maps , EveryScape, and HopStop .
Addendum: According to Download Squad, you’ll also be able to tag and label objects in the view.
If you visit the Google Maps Developer Preview page, and click on the “Browse Content” button or “Add Content” link, it will take you to a multi-page listing of dozens of currently-available Mapplets; keep clicking on the “more” link at the upper right to take you to the next page. Click on an “Add it to Maps” button below an Mapplet, and it will be added to your Mapplets bookmarks.
Michael Kosowsky, one of the creators of the “Hey What’s That” site (for panoramas, viewsheds and peak identification in Google Maps and Google Earth) has sent out an email with some news:
So I saw the article on the Google Earth Blog about the new Google Earth Outreach program, and was reading the tutorial page when I noticed that there’s now the capability to create a network KML link from a Google Spreadsheet to Google Earth. When did they do that?!
There’s been the ability to create a network link from the EditGrid online spreadsheet site for a while now, developed in part by Valery Hronusov. The new Google capability seems like it has more options and flexibility in terms of displaying information, but it’s still not exactly pushbutton simple, either – you’ll have to follow the directions quite carefully. And of course you’ll also need a Google account to do this as well. Visit the tutorial page, click on the link for the starter spreadsheet, and follow the instructions step-by-step either on the tutorial page itself or on the instruction page that shows up at the starter spreadsheet.
It’s probably best to first make a working copy of the starter spreadsheet using the File=> Copy command before doing anything else. Click on the links at the bottom to access the Template, where you can specify the file information, icon and colors to be used for the placemarks and info balloon. Click on the Placemarks link at the bottom of the spreadsheet page to enter the actual data you want to plot in Google Earth. For location, you can enter latitude/longitude directly, or enter an address and have Google geocode it for you automatically (you can cut and paste this data from another spreadsheet). Then follow the convoluted tutorial directions for creating first a network link to this spreadsheet data, then adding the network link to Google Earth. I have to believe they’ll come up with an easier way, eventually, but this will do for now for a network-linked spreadsheet.
For a static spreadsheet file, there are other options for creating a plain KML file that might make more sense; take a look in this website’s “spreadsheet category” for any number of ways to do that, like this link:
or this link:
Frank over at VerySpatial.com wants to know where the GIS-oriented Linux distributions are. Well, here are three four:
GIS-Knoppix: A GIS-oriented version of the bootable Knoppix Linux distribution, but can be installed on your computer as well. Has GRASS, OpenJump, qGIS, MapServer, Thuban, and a bunch more.
Host-GIS: A Linux distribution designed around MapServer; comes with example installations and data.
Archeos: An archaeology-oriented Linux distribution, but with lots of GIS applications as well (GRASS, MapServer, OpenJump, SAGA, etc.). But good luck downloading a copy of this – not only is it over 1 GB in size (a DVD ISO file), but if my browser doesn’t crash when I try to download it, I get a 404 error page.\
Arch Linux (AEGIS): Mentioned in the comments; GRASS, JUMP, qGIS, MapServer and a bunch more.
I install a copy of Linux on my computer every few years, then take it off – doesn’t offer enough value for the time it takes to install, configure and learn it. I may give Wubi a try, since it seems to simplify the installation process for Ubuntu in Windows, and I’m waiting to see what happens with LINA, a project to make Linux software runnable on Windows and Macintosh with a native OS look-and-feel.
The classic functionality for Google Maps is the computerized equivalent of “sticking a pin in a map”, albeit a very fancy pin with the ability to hold and display additional information. ZeeMaps takes that simple Google Maps functionality and moves it towards something a lot closer to a Geographic Information System. With ZeeMaps you can:
The service is free, and can be used without registration (though registration makes tracking and managing multiple maps easier). The interface is intuitive, and there’s a decent help section. Although some operations take a few more steps to accomplish than I would like, overall there’s nothing major to complain about; it’s a great Google Maps service, especially at the price.
Information Week has an article with the provocative title above making the blogosphere rounds. It supposedly warns us about how easy it would be to blow up a satellite using a free piece of satellite tracking software called Orbitron in combination with Google Earth. If prospective Dr. Evils read the article, though, they’ll see that the inclusion of Google Earth as part of this “system” is gratuitous. Google Earth is only used to “visualize” the satellite position based on the data it gets from the Orbitron software, and would play no part in the actual shooting down. Oh, and you need an operational ground-to-space missile system as well (I have one, but it’s down right now).
There seems to be a fad these days among journalists to treat Google Earth as some kind of military threat based on its satellite imagery; this article pushes that meme to a new extreme. Still, Orbitron is a pretty cool free program for satellite tracking. And if you’re looking for a free multi-platform program to show a visually-appealing map of the night sky, there’s no beating Stellarium.
