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Maps on Path to Mass Innovation
Ryan MacCarthy writes "When Google and Yahoo! released their map APIs last week they unleashed a horde of hungry developers eager to integrate their data with the user-friendly maps. Brilliant hacks like Chicago Crime and Craigslist Real Estate are in the midst of switching over to the new API, while sites like MetroFreeFi use the new API to make it easier to find free wi-fi locations in US cities (San Francisco, for example). Imaginative developers, like Alan Taylor (Transparency concept), are digging deep into experimentation to dream up new uses for the maps. It's great to see the innovation when hacks turn to apps." I want to see Los Angeles maps of the action in James Ellroy's novels, and a national map of the worst, funniest tourist traps across the U.S.
Google hoods... find up to date information of the street gangs in your neighborhood.
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People are making use of Google's new free API to show the location of stuff on a map.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Forget 2D maps. It's dead easy to play around with Google Earth - and you don't even need an API.
.kmz file. Then rename it to .zip and unzip it. You'll find a "doc.kml" file, xml-formatted, easy as pie to reverse-engineer and work with.
Go 'head and try it. Save a location, or folder of locations, as a
But I use Mapquest, you insensitive clod!
Come on, a username of 'iclod', a post to slashdot about a game called 'iCLOD'...it had to be done!
I want to see a map which lets me specify and measure out a route, for planning runs, bike rides, and other such sports. The goal isn't always to get from A to B!
Ideally, the interface should allow me to highlight a route over existing roads, with fudging for off-road stretches. Locations of water fountains, food stores or restaurants, and bathrooms would be a major plus too. Does such a thing exist yet?
So I thought I would look it up with Google Maps, and sure enough, I found it!
Thus rendering my need for the store irrelevant.
This last weekend I was trying to use the Cornwall tourist board website to look for a campsite. The problem with it (apart from the search not working in Firefox), was that you couldn't see exactly where in Cornwall each campsite is.
So, I have extracted the data of each site from the Cornwall tourist board website and have used it along with the Google maps API to create: Campsites in Cornwall
By the way, Cornwall is in the south-west of England.
Actually, Local Search on maps.google.com does a really good job of doing just that. Unless I am misunderstanding your question.
How about maps of the addresses of patent holders? Like cancer clusters...
--
make install -not war
Volusia County, Florida has a basic version of this and has for some time.
http://webserver.vcgov.org/Address.html
Starting from the address page, enter a valid address like "544 s floyd cir deltona". This will give you everything on the property, including a rough sketch of the floor plan. Scroll all the way down to "PALMS Mapping" and you can work thru an interactive map of the city getting data on various parcels.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You are, and it doesn't.
Local Search on google uses some crazy algorithms to find things by doing a GOOGLE SEARCH for what you entered, and then showing you addresses on a map found in the pages you referenced. (Basically.)
Yahoo Yellow Pages is actually a database of business listings, and when you search that, 99% of the time you will get all the businesses.
Example: I search for haircut near my area in Google Maps, and I get a few nearby haircut salons. I do the same thing in Yahoo Yellow Pages, and I get ALL the salons nearby, which gives me more choices, especially when there is a specific entry I am looking for. I know I will find it with YYP.
I wish Google would just hurry up and buy some Yellow Pages company's data so they can compete against that. The "Local Search" idea was interesting, but is not comparable or adequate.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
The upshot of this is that if you want to put location balloons on a satellite image, you may need to do some ad hoc adjustments to the latitude and longitude ... which I would guess you'll have to keep changing as google gradually improves the satellite presentation.
I've started a thread on the topic on the google map api discussion group, and at least one other person has noticed the same problem.
... Google maps of fictional places? I can see all kinds of tie-ins to (e)book publishing -- imagine if the Marauder's Map in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets could be accessed by the reader at any point in the story, of the potential of interactive maps of Narnia or (Alice in) Wonderland in drawing the reader into the story a bit more, blurring the boundaries between reading and gaming.
Seems like all it would take is for Google to accept the publisher's business, and post the maps.
This is the overhead of the niagara falls hydropower resevoir. The power station is lo res, but the neighborhood isn't.
This is the site of a Dupont factory, a Dunlop Tire factory and a General Motors plant. All low res.
This view shows a CSX rail depot in the north east and the Buffalo River (which has a plant for making HCl among other things iirc) in the south west. Both blurred.
Now, I have no problem with denying high resolution images of sensitive areas to the civilian population (especially since the areas I've shown you are all prominently featured in the bad dreams of local emergency services types). But if that's the criterion for deciding what's obscured and what isn't, the result is slapdash. This photo shows a cheese factory. Those white tanks are NH3 tanks for the refrigeration system. Since the winds here are usually from the south west or west, the cloud resulting from a leak in the ammonia system would blow right over one of the more densly populated neighborhoods in Buffalo. Clearly, this should have been obscured as well (Except you can see pretty much the whole thing from the street, which isn't true of the other examples).
It would seem that someone already read your mind SparafucileMan.What I want to know is who; Google, the local government, the national government (DHS or whoever), the owners of stuff being obscured?
Discuss.
I'd like to see the next dimension that Google Maps add be time. It would be cool if it were possible to have all of the satellite imagery from the last 40 years or so going right up to today with a fleet of googlesats providing near real-time imagery and then scroll through it all. Man, this makes me wish I were smart enough to work at Google.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
See Google Code for a link to the kml docs and tutorial.
Have fun!
Chris
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.