One of my co-workers, Jessica Maple, has just launched a cool new web application that allows people to view public art in the City of Nanaimo. This application combines traditional information (photograph, artist, description) with the power of geography and some neat technology from Microsoft in an innovative way.
You can visit the Nanaimo Public Art Inventory on the City’s website, or view the art directly in KML (Google Earth) or Google Maps.
One of the neat things about this is that if you’re running Google Earth 5, you can see the Microsoft Seadragon AJAX zoomable images inside the KML pop-up balloons. Jessica had to jump through some hoops to get this to work properly in multiple versions of Google Earth and in Google Maps but I think the result is worth it. For this, she borrowed heavily from some of the techniques used by Sean Askay of Google Earth Outreach in his Map The Fallen application.
Here are a couple examples of the art pieces included in the inventory:
A Thousand Fibres (View as KML)
Admiral of the Fleet (view as KML)
Way to go Jessica, and the City of Nanaimo Parks Recreation and Culture department. Full press release available here (pdf).
-J
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