Although it’s primarily aimed at bicycling Garmin Edge/Forerunner owners, Bike Route Toaster is a useful tool for any GPS user, or anyone planning a bike road trip. Create a course in a Google Maps interface by adding points along the route; Bike Route Toaster gives you the option of auto-routing, where it connects the points along roads and adds directions:
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Johann Blake writes about his new tool to plot geographic Google Analytics data in Google Earth or Google Maps. Just follow the instructions on the website to export the Analytics data in XML format to your computer, then upload the file to the site. You have the choice of creating either a straight KML file for Google Earth, or a direct plot of the data in Google Maps; the latter doesn’t seem to work currently in Firefox 3, but does work in Internet Explorer. You get placemarks for every country from which you had a visitor, color/type coded by the total number of visitors:
Click on a placemark in either Google Earth or Google Maps to see the number of visitors from that country. You can use the standard Google Analytics controls to select the desired time frame, and also filter data.
It appears as though you can also select geographic sub-regions in Google Analytics like the US states below. I did get a bunch of error messages in Google Maps, and the District Of Columbia plotted in the South Atlantic, before the rest of the states plotted correctly:
This older tool was able to plot individual visitors, but required a raw data export capability that Google Analytics no longer provides. So for now, Johann’s site is the best available GE/GM Analytics tool.
Navimatics has created a KML network link that overlays marine charts derived from NOAA data onto Google Earth. Coverage includes all of the US coastline for the contiguous 48 states, but not Alaska and Hawaii yet. From high altitudes, coverage areas are outline with yellow lines:
Continue reading ‘US Nautical Chart Overlay For Google Earth’
Slashgeo links to an announcement on Canada’s GeoBase site that SPOT imagery will become available for all of Canada by 2010. Panchromatic (black-and-white) imagery will be at 10-meter resolution, while four multispectral bands (Green, Red, Near IR, short-wavelength IR) will be available at 20-meter resolution; this is compared to Landsat 7 data (also available from GeoBase), with 15/30/60-meter resolution but more bands (one panchromatic, 6 multispectral, 2 thermal IR). A fair amount of imagery is already available:
Free registration required for access to GeoBase’s downloadable data, which includes a lot more Canadian geographical datasets (road networks, hydrography, topography, and more).
The website for GEOTaggingTool is in Russian, there’s no English documentation there, and there’s no help file included with the program. But as long as you can find the download link at upper left for version 0.5.1, that’s all you need. The program itself is in English, and there’s no install program; just unzip it into a folder. This has to be the simplest Windows photo geotagging application out there; click one button to open the GPX track, click another to open the images folder, then click “Process GEOTagging!” and the images will be geotagged (but be warned, the old images will be overwritten with the new geotagged versions without notice).
The only available options are setting the time offset and window for matching GPS track times with photo times, but GEOTaggingTool handled the time offset between my local camera time and UTC GPS time without touching these. Fast, simple and easy.
Note: Requires Microsoft .Net 2.0.
Dan Blomberg, owner of the GPSFileDepot site, has some updates and new resources at his site:
- A newer version of the Arizona 1:24K Topo map set for Garmin GPS units, with updated data and a few corrections
- 1:24K Garmin topo map for Yosemite National Park and the surrounding areas, with installation program
- A Garmin road map for Afghanistan, with installation program
- GNIS Data Processing, a Windows tool to download data from the USGS’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database, and convert it to either GPX or shapefile format
- GNIS Data Processing requires installation of PostgreSQL with the PostGIS extensions; the site now has a tutorial on how to install them on a Windows system
Remy Paternoster writes to announce a new tool he’s created, an Excel app called KMLxl that imports a KML polygon/placemark file created in Google Earth, and lets you both attach data to each polygon and scale the height of the polygon to a variable value:
The process is straightforward, involving creating polygons and associated placemarks in Google Earth, importing the KML file into Excel with the app, adding data, and then exporting the results as a new KML file. You can update the Excel spreadsheet at any time with new data, and create a new KML that reflects the newer data. In addition to the app, Remy has an easy-to-follow step-by-step tutorial of the process in an accompanying PDF file.
Gapminder is a flash-based tool for creating animated charts based on various parameters and indicators, including geographic areas. Here’s a TED talk showing examples of uses by its developer, Hans Rosling:
Up until recently, you could look at Gapminder charts for specific datasets at the website, but not create your own. Google, which bought the Gapminder technology in 2007, recently released a Google Gadget that lets you create your own Gapminder charts that can be embedded in a web page. You’ll need a Google Docs account, and also need to add the “Motion Chart” gadget from this web page. Once added, it can be accessed from the charts/gadgets button in a Google docs spreadsheet.
