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

I feel that you must return my feelings.  After all, you indexed the entire KML collection of my city’s RESTful property database.

You seem shy to admit your love.  No matter how hard people look, you won’t reveal our secret.  Instead, you show a cold public face of centreline geocoding and pretty pictures.

Please Google Maps, won’t you shout our love from the rooftops, exposing our deep data relationship to the world?

Yours Unrequited…

-J

Follow the video instructions above for setting up jEdit, with the following exception: when you go to dock Sidekick, you click on Sidekick instead of Structure Browser and then, in order to start parsing the document, you need to select XML mode:

Once you have loaded your KML file, replace the root kml entity with the following instead of the older Google schemas, and you will be able to validate against the OGC’s KML and partial Atom schemas as you work:

<kml 

  xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2" 

  xmlns:kml="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2" 

  xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"

  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

  xsi:schemaLocation="

    http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2 http://schemas.opengis.net/kml/2.2.0/ogckml22.xsd

    http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom http://schemas.opengis.net/kml/2.2.0/atom-author-link.xsd"

>

One odd thing that I noticed in validating my KML.  When I placed the <name> entity anywhere other than right after its parent entity (such as Document or Placemark) the parser complained that it was not valid.  I don’t know if not having the <name> as the first entity is truly invalid, or if this is just a little quirk of the schema or the parser.  The Galdos KML Validator throws the same error.

The main reason I went through setting this up is that I decided that I had to, in good conscience, ignore the part of the OGC KML written standard that constrains Atom relation types to "related".  Not specifying the correct type of relationship means that I am contributing to the downfall of society, or at least to a less meaningful GeoWeb.  See my previous post and some follow-up at Sean Gillies’ blog for more on this.  Using jEdit allows me to ensure that my documents validate against the schema, which gives me at least some level of comfort when ignoring the online validator.

-J