Archive for August, 2006

Wikimapia

Published by Noel Jenkins on August 13, 2006 in Google Maps. 0 Comments

Wikimapia is an impressive Google Maps/wiki mashup aiming to describe the Earth. The interface is exceptionally user friendly and it takes seconds to place a Wikimapia on a web page (though not this one because WordPress doesn’t like that kind of thing.)

wikimapia
I’ve placed a Wikimapia example on Juicy Geography to demonstrate. How about getting students to describe their place for homework on the first day back? The site doesn’t require any form of registration and although there is an option to report spam, I can’t help feeling that a lot of places will end up with less than flattering descriptions!

Create a network link for your blog

Published by Noel Jenkins on August 13, 2006 in Google Earth. 3 Comments

Cullompton, England

Following on from the last post describing the miraculous Explore Our Pla.net, I’ve been amazed to discover how easy it is to create a Google Earth network link that locates recent Digital Geography posts on Google Earth. Notice that I’ve started this post with my location? This ensures that the network link below will harvest the post and display it in Google Earth.

google earth placemark network link for Digital Geography

Instructions come from a great post by Gerado64 at the Google Earth Community

What’s going on is that the RSS feed from this blog is being converted to GeoRSS by the Geonames service Geonames examines the feed to see if it can pick out any place names. Should a place be identified, Geonames looks up the latitude and longitude, then encodes this into the RSS feed. It’s obviously not perfect, a post about Jack London for example would locate the gnarly author in Oxford Street rather than the Klondike, though clever disambiguation technology helps Geonames make an intelligent guess at the context of the place name. Explore Our Pla.net is helping to improve the natural language geocoder with a feature that lets you pass feedback to the geonames server.

Explore our Pla.net: a map interface for GeoRSS feeds

Published by Noel Jenkins on August 10, 2006 in Google Earth and Google Maps. 0 Comments

During some rather aimless research on GeoRSS I came across a brilliant map based feed reader. Explore Our Pla.net is a tool for displaying geolocated RSS feeds, indeed it managed to locate the most recent articles on Digital Geography by having a stab at identifying the locations of the recent posts.

georss feed Digital Geography in Explore Our Pla.net

I was interested in the way that the Explore Our Pla.net worked, and the way in which some of my blog posts were being located in thought-proking places, for example the recent Atlas Gloves post was located in Morocco. It transpires that the Digital Geography RSS feed is being processed through Geonames. This service identifies place names in the posts and adds the relevant latitude and longitude, outputting the original RSS feed as GeoRSS.

podcastplanet Podcasts can be geotagged and displayed in the map window

On closer inspection I discovered that Explore Our Planet is a rather more ambitious project. Apart from a large collection of dedicated GeoRSS feeds, it links to a large number of very useful Web Mapping Services (WMS) layers which are displayed on a user-friendly geo-desktop. To fully apppreciate the potential of Explore Our Pla.net it’s necessary to register. You can then browse through the data layers and GeoRSS feeds as well as adding your own GeoLinks.

What’s in it for the classroom teacher?
With the geo-desktop projected onto a whiteboard, a teacher can identify geotagged audio/video podcasts and news feeds, switch between different map and satellite views including near real-time MODIS data from the Terra and Aqua satellites, plot weather, storms and earthquake data and map sounds from the freesound project. There are a number of other other valuable layers, for example daylight, population density and settlement night lights. Of course, much of this information is widely available, and in some respects other applications like the excellent Earth Browser are still to be preferred. Explore Our Pla.net is however web-based, and therefore available from any PC.