Looks like the east coast of Vancouver Island got a huge resolution increase in Google Earth. Previously, a large proportion of this area was low-resolution satellite imagery. Now much of the island appears in what looks like half-metre (18 inch) resolution. The copyright on this data reads IMTCAN, which I assume is Integrated Mapping Technologies. In general, this is a great upgrade and these photos really show off some of the recently improved terrain.

I feel sorry for the folks in Port Alberni though… Not only did they miss out on the new imagery for most of the city, but they also have a huge imagery glitch in the middle of their community:

There are a couple other places where the imagery was not very well edge-matched (some white triangles in the middle of the Strait of Georgia) and there are some really odd colours in the water, but I think that most people will be happy to trade consistancy for clarity.

-J

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• KML Goodness from the FME User Conference (1)

The FME User Conference is always great value. You get to see interesting presentations, learn about new technologies, and talk to bright people from all across the industry. This last point is probably the most important to me. Mixed in with other great conversations, I got to chat at length with Ed Katibah about SQL Server Spatial, and Don Cooke told me I dressed too well to be a neogeographer

It is also the best place to corner an FME developer. I managed to grab Tom Weir, Safe’s KML guru, and go over some of the changes in KML support with FME 2008. During a presentation on the first day of the conference I had included an “easter egg” where I spoke about how to enable active mouse-overs in KML using FME. To my chagrin, after a couple minutes with Tom I realized that my advice was not exactly best practice, and with FME2008 becomes downright ridiculous.

Here’s the before shot from my slide deck (zipped workspace):

And the after shot once I applied what Tom showed me (zipped workspace):

Obviously, the FME 2008 press release should read: “KML Support in FME: Now with 50% less fat!”

KML FME has been generating multi-geometry for information points for quite some time, so that cuts most of the data wrangling out to generate the info point and merge the features into multi-geometry. And FME 2008 will automatically generate StyleMap elements for you if you follow a couple sneaky tricks.

First, when you create each KMLStyler, set its name to the style ID you want it to receive:

And second, on your geometry set the kml_target_style_normal and kml_target_style_highlight attributes to the IDs that you created in the KMLStylers:

That gets my embarrassment out of the way, but doesn’t even begin to touch on the extent of KML 2.2 support in FME 2008. Another issue that I have written about is extended data or schema support, and I am happy to say that FME deals with this. Attributes are stored in your output KML as extended data by default, and it is easy to generate a BalloonStyle template. Here’s my first take on this support, which does a great job of separating data from presentation (zipped workspace):

And a quick look at the new basic editor which is included in FME and used for modifying BalloonStyle templates:

Which gives us this KML output (source).

There is a going to be a lot more to the KML 2.2 support in FME 2008, including generation of image pyramids for PhotoOverlays, but I’ll leave it to you to explore those on your own.

-J

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OK, maybe not the same nation as y’all, but it’s still pretty cool.

This morning, a segment on CTV’s Canada AM called "Canadians on the Cutting Edge" featured the work I’ve done with Google Earth for my employer, the City of Nanaimo.

(click image for video, or follow this link: http://tinyurl.com/2oshr7 )

I’m still playing on my 15 minutes of fame from some articles in the Vancouver Sun and Globe and Mail (paid content, but there’s an excerpt on Carsons Post). At the time, local papers picked it up, as well as local broadcast and cable TV.

I think that this puts me over the 15-minute mark, so hopefully it’s over now

-J

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I wonder how wrong the infamous 80% rule is. It seems like more and more content which has not been thought of as geospatial is getting added to the world’s most popular geo-browser.

Here’s a funny shot, it’s me and my boss talking about Google Earth in a YouTube video, inside of Google Earth. Don’t look too close or you’ll get sucked in by the infinite recursion

Sorry for jumping on the “everyone posts about Google announcements” bandwagon… I usually try to avoid it.

-J

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