Tag Archives: Google Earth

Nanaimo Public Art with Seadragon AJAX and KML awesomeness

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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

Nanaimo Photorealistic Buildings in Google Earth

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Just a quick shout-out to Pauline Hackwood and the City of Nanaimo‘s planning department for their initiative in starting to model Nanaimo’s downtown in Sketchup Pro, and for making these models available to others in Google Earth via the 3D Warehouse.

 image

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.

thematicmappingblog rules!

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At university, I took a hard-core cartography class at one point. I remember manually (pencil, ruler and eraser) performing a Douglas-Poiker line generalization and using Lettraset, but I also took away a healthy respect for map design and elegance in conveying complex information.

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

Clear skies… mostly :)

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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.

New Terrain VI

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:

Port Alberni Gulch

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

KML Goodness from the FME User Conference

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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):

Old FME KML StyleMap Workspace

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

New FME KML StyleMap 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:

New FME KML StyleMap Workspace - KMLStyler trick

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:

New FME KML StyleMap Workspace - AttributeCreator trick

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):

FME KML workspace using balloonstyle

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

FME KML workspace using balloonstyle editor

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