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
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:
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.
Nearby.org.uk has a page of useful utilities for both Google Earth and Google Maps. Many are UK-oriented, but others have more general utility:
… and more. The whole site is worth poking around, especially if you’re from the UK.
A couple of earlier posts have dealt with sites that allow you to determine a point halfway geographically between two others: a.placebetween.us and Mezzoman. Via OgleEarth comes a third: the Geographic Midpoint Calculator. Enter two or more locations, and the GMS will calculate the midpoint or average location (for more than two points). You can weight the locations by time you’ve spent in that city, though you can use the time-weight as a proxy for other weighting factors. Results are given in latitude/longitude, with the option to plot the original locations and average location in Google Maps.
I posted earlier about a.placebetween.us, a site that lets you enter two addresses, then finds a business of a specified type located about halfway between those locations as a convenient meeting place. GoogleMapsMania posts about a similar site called Mezzoman that does essentially the same thing. It’s a bit more convenient to use in entering the addresses compared to a.placebetween.us, but has a smaller map window with less flexible map controls (i.e. no zoom slider, just Zoom In/Out buttons). The initial drop-down business type selector is limited, but you can enter the business type of your choice in the Google Search box that appears after you click the “Mezzoman Go!” button.
Edited 6/13/07 to fix mistake pointed out in comments (thanks, Moawall!).
A while back, I posted about Image Cutter, a program that lets you tile and view any image, e.g. a scanned map, in the Google Maps interface. Microsoft Research’s HD View offers a similar capacity, letting you post multi-giga-pixel images on the web in a flexibly scrollable and zoomable format. The website says that their goals were:
Unlike Image Cutter, HD View supports cylindrical and spherical panoramas. Unlike Image Cutter, unfortunately, HDView requires an ActiveX download, which means it’s Windows only, and currently only works in Internet Explorer. Also, the HD View content creator (hdmake) is only command-line-interface at this time.