Puzzlepieces – tag ‘maps’

Virtual Earth / Live Maps: The New Release of Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D is now Live! - when I was studying for exams this past week, Live Maps, the team I worked with and will be returning to in August, released a major upgrade. Here is what is cool to me, although there is a lot more.

• labels on “birds-eye” (oblique) imagery - this is actually very complex to do, from a technical standpoint, but it makes the imagery much more useful
• MapCruncher integration. I have played with MapCruncher a lot, it is an amazingly useful tool for putting raster/PDF maps onto modern web maps, and I have shown it off to a lot of people
• better viewing (and RSS feeds!) for user-added items everywhere
• improved display of KML files, which is especially important, as KML 2.2 is now an OGC standard geographic data format
• walking directions - people who know me in person know that driving directions aren’t very useful to me. Unfortunately, walking directions isn’t on Live Maps now, but it has been added to the API. So far it only uses a subset of the road network, no foot paths, parks, etc., so hopefully that will be improved upon

Okay, so I am cheating a bit here. Rather than writing a new post, I’m linking to a page on my wiki where I have been collecting links for several years already: mfagan wiki / waterloo geo stuff.

Back when I started UWhub (now largely defunct) it was first going to be a mapping site for the area around campus. Then I decided it would be easier to make just regular web search first, then add a search with a geographic component (e.g. housing search), at which point I would add the map. Apparently a search engine can be a lot of work so I never got past that. But since the beginning there I have been collecting links for tools and resources for mapping the University of Waterloo, the city itself, etc. At some point it moved from a text file to a spot on my wiki, and I cleaned up and edited a lot of it recently. I have also dumped some other things on the page that don’t have much to do with mapping.

So that was a long prelude to me pointing out that that page is an extremely useful and comprehensive resource. While it is very unlikely I will actually put all the data into a single map site, the collection of links by itself is great. It includes lots of maps, at various scales (one classroom within the school, the entire world…), and tons of other data sources that can be mapped in some way, such as businesses, transit, housing, news, jobs, etc. It includes a lot of resources most people didn’t know existed, from health inspection records for all food outlets in the region, maps of crimes in the area by week and crime type, interactive maps with high resolution aerial imagery from multiple different years, geological data, historical and future maps, detailed maps of the all the floors of all the UW libraries, etc. And I keep finding new things to add, let me know if you see things I’m missing. I will definitely reference some of these links on a later post about the city.

Official Google Maps API Blog: Microformats in Google Maps - they could do a lot more, but it’s a good start.