Me

Ross

This past week was an interesting bit of synchronicity. First, Ross took advantage of a Costco sale on the Garmin Forerunner 405, a really interesting bit of sports gadgetry that gives you real time location and performance information including heart rate.

Garmin Forerunner 405

Second, Google released Google Earth 5.2 with considerable enhancements including elevation profiles and the inclusion of additional data (such as heart rate) in its GPS import function.

Google Earth 5.2

And third, this weekend Ross took part in the Kusam Klimb, a gnarly 23 km long trek over Mount H”Kusam near Sayward BC, featuring rugged conditions and a 1.5 km change in elevation. Make sure you check out this year’s conditions…

Kusam Klimb in Google Earth

After completing the event, Ross somehow managed to summon up the energy to post a link to his data upload on Facebook. I have to say, Garmin’s web-based visualizer is very nice! it combines a graph, a map, and gauges in a very clear and easy to use format.

Garmin Player

If you visit the activity page, you will notice that below the map you can export as TCX, GPX, and KML files. Garmin’s KML file is actually a very nice time-enabled presentation, but it doesn’t include the heart rate or speed data. For this, you need to download the GPX file. The easiest way to open it in Google Earth is to drag it into the globe window. This pops up a dialogue asking what features you want in the generated KML, and then creates a new file in your Temporary Places.

GPS Data Import

Now the fun begins. Of course, the obvious first step is to click on the Play button in the time menu to watch Ross run the trail…

GPX Animation

But that capability has been there for a while. What I find really interesting is the extra data that the GPX file brought along for the ride: heart rate, elevation, and speed. You can see the heart rate and speed (I think it may pull elevation from the terrain) by right-clicking anywhere on the track and choosing Show Elevation Profile. This gives you a cool interactive screen where you can display up to two variables, position your mouse anywhere along the graph, and see the information on the globe.

Ross on the Kusam Klimb

I have to admit that I have some reservations about this. The profile was very usable, but the design didn’t really fit with the rest of the Google Earth interface, and I would have liked to see all three data points (elevation, speed, and heart rate) at once. Fortunately, Google is well known for its incremental improvements, and I’m sure that it will get better over time.

Something else you can do with GPX data is create a Tour of your run and follow along with dizzying swoops and dips :) To do this, import the GPX as a linestring instead of a track, then expand the legend until you get to the Path and click on the “Play” button, and finally save the path tour.

Play the Path

Save as Tour

You may need to play around with the Tour Settings in the Google Earth options a bit to get the correct zoom and speed, but eventually you’ll end up with something like the link below. Download the file, expand it in the Google Earth menu, and double-click on the Tour for some dorm-room-Quake queasiness:

Run Ross Run!

Whew. Time for some hard-earned relaxation! ;)

-J

As a result of this great collaboration between city staff and residents, Nanaimo has gained an invaluable resource. Apart from the obvious benefit of showing downtown Nanaimo off to the world, this new level of completeness gives City staff an amazing resource to use for three-dimensional planning and analysis.

Have a look at this cool movie highlighting the community’s hard work:

If the stars align correctly, I will be speaking about this experience at GeoWeb 2010 later this summer. Hope to see you there!

-J

The City of Nanaimo is now managing a 3D Warehouse Collection called Nanaimo Current Models, containing Pauline’s models and any other good models of Nanaimo the collection managers run across.  If you’re interested in having your high-quality photorealistic geocoded model added to this collection, let the City know in the Nanaimo 3D Models Google Group.

These tools are a great way to convey planning information to the public.  In the future, hopefully the City will also be able to publish historical models of buildings that have been replaced and conceptual models of new developments for public review.

-J

P.S. Cheers to the Sketchup folks too; it didn’t take them very long at all to evaluate the initial set of models and push them into Google Earth.

P.P.S. Like all articles on this site, this represents my personal opinion and viewpoint, not that of my employer.

These resources will be single-feature, and will each be related to exactly one HTML representation of the same feature.  Now, it seems logical to me that I would specify an atom:link with rel="alternate" inside of these KML files, either at the Document level or perhaps at the Placemark level.

Unfortunately, from section 9.1.3.5.1 of the official OGC KML specification:

The atom:link rel attribute shall be present and its value shall be related.

What the heck?  I’m not an XML guy by any means, but I think this means that the best I can do is specify a "I think I met that guy in a bar a couple years ago" kind of relationship, when what I really want is something more like "hey, that’s me in a dress shirt."

Now, if I’m right, the question is:  do I exclude the atom:link element from my KML, do I include the element and settle for a generic relationship, or do I intentionally break compliance with the OGC specification.  Tough choice.

-J

I love reading books like the ones by Cynthia Brewer and John Krygier on Fantom Planet’s list, and Bjørn Sandvik’s Thematic Mapping Blog fascinates me in the same way. I always considered Google Earth to be a bit of a dead fish as far as cartographic elements go, but Bjørn’s work shows that some truly amazing representations are possible with a bit of work. If you haven’t checked this blog out, give it a read.

-J

Some interesting entries have been nominated. In particular, FDO and Fusion (both open source applications) are competing alongside other prominent applications in the Innovator Award category.

Full disclosure: My work on earth.nanaimo.ca (built with MapGuide Open Source technology) is nominated for the Public Enterprise category. Please only vote for it if you think it’s the most deserving solution in this category.

-J

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

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

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

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