First GIS

Saturday, June 4, 2011

KML is now an open standard

Monday, April 14, 2008at1:32:00 PM

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

The Google Geo APIs are all about building powerful tools to share geo information with the world. We've been really interested in seeing the way that KML has been used all across the web to express geographic content, and today we're very excited to announce that the Open Geospatial Consortium has announced its acceptance of KML 2.2 as an official OGC Standard. That means that KML is not just a Google Earth standard, it's not even just a Google standard. It is now an official standard for presenting geographic data. Read more about this great news on the LatLong blog.

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Labels:KML,OGC

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Streetview in the Wild: A Flourishing Species

Tuesday, April 22, 2008at5:58:00 PM

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Several weeks ago, we announced the official release of Street View in the Maps API and invited developers to post examples of their Street View mashups. We crossed our fingers and hoped that we'd made the classes flexible and functional enough for developers to work with, and soon enough the examples started flowing in.

Here are some of my favorites:

DualMaps: For a given location, displays the Street View, Birds Eye View, and Google aerial map view simultaneously and lets you embed or share the result

Povo: A local reviews site specially for Boston. Displays street view in a lightbox for each location, and has made a Street View tour especially for the recent Boston Marathon.

StreetView Adventure Game: In the spirit of the classic interactive fiction games like Zork, this demo lets you play a short game that begins with chasing a guy trying to climb out a window in San Francisco.

Also check out VegasVision, Ong Map V2 (Alpha), VPike, FlyRig, Street View Gadget, LotView, Street View SF Tour, RealBird, Glotter and a Street View Tour Gadget. And if you loved Trulia's implementation (announced on Google LatLong last week), check out this demo that shows how to angle a street view panorama towards the side of the street that a building is on. (It involves math, but don't worry, we've done it for you.)

Thanks to all you developers for sharing your work with us, and as always, please post your examples or questions in the forum.

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Google Developer Days: Meet the Google Geo Engineers

Wednesday, April 23, 2008at10:48:00 PM

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Geo APIs Team

Google Developer Days 2008, a set of one-day developer events, are back and will take place in locations around the world. We've designed these events for developers with strong coding backgrounds, so that we can discuss our APIs, developer tools and applications.

We'll host Google Developer Days in these locations:Yokohama, Japan (June 10) Beijing, China (June 12)Taipei, Taiwan (June 14)Sydney, Australia (June 18) Mexico City, Mexico (June 23)Sao Paulo, Brazil (June 27)London, UK (Sept 16) Paris, France (Sept 18) Munich, Germany (Sept 23)Madrid, Spain (Sept 25) Milan, Italy (Oct 21)Prague, Czech (Oct 23)Moscow, Russia (Oct 28)If you're based in the US, we encourage you to come to Google I/O, on May 28-29 in San Francisco.

At Google Developer Day, our Maps and KML engineers will share their inside knowledge on our developer tools and APIs, including the Google Maps API and KML. In many locations we'll do deep dives into code and conduct hands-on codelabs. If you come to Yokohama and Mexico City, say hi to me and Pamela Fox.

We've posted detailed information for our early dates and will be adding more information for other locations soon. If you're a developer, we encourage you to sign-up for a Google Developer Day at a nearby location. I hope to see you there.

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Labels:Developer Day,Google Maps,KML

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Friday, June 3, 2011

Armageddon Pills and KML in Google Earth

Wednesday, May 07, 2008at5:47:00 PM

Guest post by Matt Brown, concept3D

I’m Matt Brown, a kml developer and designer at concept3D in Boulder, Colorado.

Google Earth has provided a new group of developers with the opportunity to build virtual ‘geowebsites’ specific to vertical markets. Armageddon Pills, a travel book by John Higham, combines this power of Google Earth and a printed book to illustrate the tale of one family’s journey around the globe in 52 weeks.

After creating numerous kml files, he asked us (concept3d) to create a browser look and feel while in Google Earth. We attempted to simplify the Google Earth experience for a broader audience, focusing on its on-screen and balloon navigation systems.

When opening the file, you will find a main menu, or in this case the table of contents, of on-screen buttons. This menu is broken down into chapter groupings that contain sub-menus of icons related to the book. This allows the reader to find ‘where they are’ in the book, and gives them the ability to ‘read’ the kml from start to finish. Each balloon along the traveled path offers an interesting snippet and sometimes a photo or video associated with their locations. Navigation arrows were added to each balloon to allow the information to be chronologically documented and experienced by the end user, and a “home” button to get back to the main menu. Additionally, there are “menu” placemarks scattered around the globe that will help you find the main menu if you are lost in space.

We rely on feature anchors for navigating between balloons and a very high altitude (12680000 meters) to create the effect of a menu. You can download our full KML here.

A big thanks to Mano Marks for his insight and for taking interest in this project. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at matt.brown@concept3d.com.

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Labels:KML

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