Geoglobe.org.uk

Cycling resources around Edinburgh + Scotland

2008-08-31T10:58:00.003Z

First of all - apologies for the lack of blogging. I moved house recently and it has taken a long time getting an internet connection back up and running. As ever, British Telecom were unbelievably frustrating to deal with. Useless customer advisors, ridiculous bureacracy, mistakes and sheer shoddiness.

Anyway, I now have a place to store a bike and I bought a new one a few weeks ago. I've never cycled in Edinburgh prior to this but had heard of some decent routes in and around the city. When I started using some of the tracks they exceeded all my expectations (although to be honest, these were quite low!). I live in the North of Edinburgh now, and my daily unmotorised commute takes me some 4.5 miles into the centre of Leith. The vast majority of this distance is on dedicated pedestrian/cycle paths part of a network of routes called the North Edinburgh Path Network. A useful brochure and map is available from cycleshops or on this PDF. These paths follow old railway lines across this area and allow you to get half-way across the city without encountering any motorised traffic. From Leith out to Cramond or to Murrayfield, along well-sign posted tracks. The city of Edinburgh council who look after the paths have also produced a further PDF showing additional cycling facilities in the area but resources are also available for other parts of Edinburgh and around.

This brings me neatly onto the wider picture. Sustrans is the country's leading 'Sustainable Transport' charity and has produced a series of maps that show some of the national cycling routes that exist. Their old site looks to run on an arcIMS application, which feels a bit old, but does contain a vast amount of detail. They also have a more modern version which uses Google Maps to show dedicated day routes. As you can probably imagine, this new site with the Google Mapping is much more user friendly, but sadly lacks the detail that the Sustrans main site does.

Over time I am planning to build up my own little collection of cycling routes and make these available on google maps or other mapping platforms. While the other sites are useful, I don't feel they provide nearly enough detail on how to get around, where you go when the dedicated path ends, and how to connect between the different routes. That isn't to beat them up too much - in fact, I think they are an excellent resource, and if cycling is promoted further we can force decision makers to improve the network even further.

Where do geoglobe's fit into this? Worry not, all these routes will be available within both your web browser and as KML. Now I've just to get cracking on them.

Happy cycling.

A trip down to London city

2008-05-19T20:33:00.003Z

I must have lived a fairly sheltered life so far. Nobody can believe that my trip two weeks ago to London was the first time I'd been there. Well it was and here are some photos to prove it!

As part of my job, I deliver software training to mainly new clients. This particular client was based in Victoria, Westminster - right in the heart of the tourist part of the city. Above, Westminster Cathedral, located just along from Victoria station. Below the very impressive (and unbelievably huge) Westminster Abbey, together with a close up of the carvings above the entrance.

I was just down for a couple of days, so only had the overnight stay to work my way round the countless sights. I soon ran out of sunlight however, so apologies for some of these darker shots. Below, the first glance of Big Ben across the House of Lords, whereas the next shot is the familiar sight of the houses of parliament. Nope, didn't see anyone famous - just a lot of police!

Couldn't make up my mind about the London Eye. It's a great landmark yes. Certainly catches the eye. But is it really neccesary with all the other fantastic sights around? Still, the Thames was impressive and I couldn't get over quite how busy it is on the river.

So after wandering around the River, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey I headed up to Trafalgar square. Nelson's column above with the moon behind. Then from further afield in the dark, a slightly blurry shot of the night skyline where I had been earlier.

The following day I got back home pretty late after a delayed flight (blame easyjet), but after a bit of a lie in, I decided to head out to the hills. Pictures of the very pretty Ben Lawers soon - although it was again unfortunately not ideal for photography. Must stop making excuses, and blog more! And start including some GIS related stuff!

Oh, better give sis a mention. She's now away out in Colorado on a course. Read all about it on her blog. If you can stand the colours of course! Gray!?

The views from Schiehallion

2008-04-20T15:54:00.003Z

This weekend I needed to get out of the city so I went for a clamber up Schiehallion (1083m) up in Highland Perthshire, just North of Aberfeldy, overlooking Loch Tummel & Loch Rannoch.

I'll leave the route description and map to Walk Highlands, although provided you find the Braes of Foss car park, you can't really go wrong on this one! It's a single path up and back down, quite direct and not too bad all around. The only slight obstacle facing us was the prospect of some snow and ice. I wasn't really equiped for dealing with ice, so I went up with the intention of just going as far as I could manage. As it turns out the snow was fairly fresh and soft and really wasn't too hazardous at all, and was only really an issue for the last 500-600ft of the climb.

While Schiehallion is one of these slightly annoying mountains where you never get a good view of the summit, except from right at the start, you do absolutely stunning views back behind you to Loch Tummel, and better still South towards the Ben Lawers massif. Once you hit the top, Loch Rannoch also reveals itself, with the high peaks of the Cairngorms in the distance to the North (above), and those of Glen Coe in the West.

Ben Lawers can be seen in the photo above, whereas Loch Tummel can be viewed below. I also did a quick KML, that should have the photo locations embedded. Or see a 360 degree movie from the summit!

Below, roughly the view from Google Earth.

Away from the photos, there is some prominent history behind Schiehallion. It was used by Nevil Maskelyne to calculate the mass of the earth, on the basis of knowing the mass of the mountain (it could be accurately calculated being such a conical shape) and the first mountain to be mapped using contour lines. General info on wikipedia and Munro Magic as ever. Better still, its name is used by a brewer for a rather tasty ale.

Collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf?

2008-03-31T20:30:00.003Z

Usually 'scientific' stories like these fail to hit the headlines, unless accompanied by some wild doom and gloom headlines or miracle diet. The BBC however ran this story last week after capturing some video footage of the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse. Further press reports by The Guardian, The Times and CNN brought the story into the mainstream, placing the blame firmly at the hands of global warming (who or what else?).

source: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Rather than just read-about it, a number of GE Community Members contributed to KML links showing imagery in Google Earth, some of them over time. My favourite KML though is the delightfully simple effort by NASA to compile four images showing the moment of the breakup, and the end result just over two weeks later. Samples below.

Of course, Ogle Earth had the best round-up, with some nice embedded videos and it's own KML file. For an overview of the different ice shelves and excellent links to imagery, you could do worse than the National Snow and Ice Data Center's compilation of it's Antarctic data sets. Plenty of images available there to import into a virtual globe there!

The big secret news was...

2008-03-06T18:37:00.002Z

ESRI holdings strengthens position as market leader in GIS with GeoWise acquisition. As I can't really say anything impartial, I guess I'll just leave it as that :)

A day at Glen Dollar - kml and photos

2008-03-05T21:22:00.004Z

After a frantic week at work (major releases and major announcements (about which I can say nothing!)) - I decided to have a couple of hours to myself. As it was blowing a gale and in my rush to get away I had forgotten my hat, I opted to visit Glen Dollar. I've been meaning to walk around there for ages, but for whatever reason I've never taken the time too. It's a shame, as it's really quite accessible from Edinburgh, and after a day of rain (like when I went), it turns into an absolutely stunning little gorge, with waterfalls, lush vegetation and a majestic castle dominating the skyline.

Rather than post the pictures on here directly (bar the one above), I've compiled a little kml to show the location of the route and where a few of the photos were taken from.

Oh, a few weeks ago I went to seeEd Parsons give a presentation at the Edinburgh Earth Observatory series of seminars, at the Institute of Geography, Edinburgh. While it was an excellent presentation which I think the whole audience thoroughly enjoyed, he didn't really cover anything new, groundbreaking, or terribly exciting - hence why I haven't really bothered to blog about it 'till now. As the main focus was on Google Earth, I'm not really complaining - it was very enjoyable. Thanks for making the effort to come up Ed.

Kilimanjaro - books and some background links

2008-02-15T21:02:00.003Z

A couple of weeks ago, it was my birthday and while not feeling like death to the man flu/cold, I got given some Kilimanjaro books by my parents. My collection now includes two trekkers guides, a general travel guide and a booklet on altitude sickness. Brief reviews below.

Source: Wikipedia

First up is the 'pocket' guide Kilimanjaro: The Trekking Guide to Africa's Highest Mountain - 2nd Edition (Trailblazer Guides) by Henry Stedman. It's a very well presented little book, with a good little general background about the area (having not been there yet, you'll forgive me for not knowing for sure!). It's much more a book tailored to precisely what I plan to do, trek Kilimanjaro, but also have my first experience of Africa, the area surrounding the mountain, choose an operator, consider all my options and so forth. It it's black and white, bar a few colour inserts (which are excellent). It includes the obligatory route descriptions with route sketches. I'm not sure yet whether I love or hate these! The best way to describe it really is as a Rough Guide or Lonely Planet, but one that goes into far greater detail on this specific area.

The other trekking guide I received, pitches itself a little differently from Stedman's. Kilimanjaro: Preparation, Practicalities and Ascent Routes (Cicerone Mountain Walking) by Alexander Stewart aims itself a little more closely at the trekking itself - though of course does also cover all the angles as the guide above, but just not in as much detail. Cicerone have a good reputation for trekking and climbing guides, and I must say, this book being colour throughout defintely has a better pick up and read appeal than the one by Stedman above. It extensively covers the flora and fauna, the ascent and descent routes as well as the mountaineering history behind the summit. I prefer it currently - though the jury is still out on which is best.

My final gift was a little book called Altitude Illness: Prevention and Treatment (Mountaineers Outdoor Expert) by Stephen Bezrucka. I'm sure this was inspired by a caring mother! To be honest, I haven't had much of a chance to read this yet, either to inform myself or stifle my enthusiasm. In any case, I'm sure it will be an important read.

The last book - not a gift - is the ever-excellent Rough Guide to Tanzania - Edition 2. I'm fairly sure this doesn't need much of a review. Rough Guides are always packed full of information, usually fairly reliable. You either love these guides, or you're a lonely planet convert - there's rarely a middle ground! I like it, in particular for it's frank, honest and sometimes off-putting commentary on travel around the globe. If something is wrong with a place, the guide will usually say so.

More general reading of course on the web, though it's hard finding non-biased descriptions out amongst the hundreds of tour operator run websites. The UNEP page on Kilimanjaro National Park, has a nice if slightly statistically based description with plenty of further reading. The park website itself, though rather understated, has some nice photographs. While on about official websites, I found the Kilimanjaro Airport website particularly enthralling. Not sure about the akwardly resized Google image - but what it lacks in quality it makes up for in character! Then a live webcam encountered on a travel company page - though currently down - looks pretty cool. Will that do you for now?

Tackling Kilimanjaro.. it begins here..

2008-02-05T20:55:00.000Z

It was decided during this long and cold month that next year my dad and I will be making an attempt on Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain and (apparently) the world's highest free standing mountain. I've already managed to collect a number of trekking brochures and guide books on Tanzania and the Kilimanjaro mountain, but what better way than to begin exploring it in a virtual globe?

Looking over Kilimanjaro to the Serengeti plain in Google Earth.

Looking up Kilimanjaro over the Machame trail in NASA's World Wind

Over the next year I'll hopefully be blogging about my preparations for this 'trek-of-a-lifetime' and I'd really apreciate if readers who have been there before left me comments and suggestions on what (and not) to do. I'll compile resources, hopefully plenty of Kili related KML and other Google Earth, Worldwind and other GIS'y related news items. And I'll try my best to take a GPS unit everywhere I go between now on my training preparations to the final step back off the mountain after our achievements (fingers crossed).

Also a quick mention to the Google Earth Blog who gave me my first bit of 'mainstream' blog publicity through the middle of January. Thanks Frank.

Virtual walking in Scotland

2008-01-16T21:02:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I was pondering to myself why nobody had done anything clever yet in terms of getting many of Scotland's hill walking routes up on the web. There were plenty of amateur sites giving route descriptions and photos, or with snippets of OS maps included, or showing the rough location of the hill the walk focussed on - but none that went the whole hog.

For me the biggest bug bear is always figuring out from where a route starts, which is especially an issue if, like me, you are too tight to buy a walking guide, OS map etc. A motoring map or atlas just doesn't cut it when it comes to finding out where to park, what route to take etc.

OS mapping is now of course fairly freely available via OS's GetaMap, Multimap or various other mapping services - but it doesn't resolve the problem of where routes start, finish and roughly go on your now freely obtained OS printout.

Then Stefan at Ogle Earth posted about an email he received from the author, Paul Webster, of Walk Highlands - an online site of hill walking knowledge, with some great route descriptions (hundreds!), photos and for me, best of all, some awesome KML displaying these routes. I think it's a fantastic tool - my only qualm - I'm based in Edinburgh, and the areas he's left out for now are the ones nearest me! But not too worry!

The site is marvelously simple to navigate too, and packed full of information, from where to stay, what to do with your GPS device, what to make of the weather reports(!) and what else to see and do. There's a forum for general community stuff too. It's a little bit Isle of Skye focussed, but I'm sure it will expand if the demand is there. And if he manages to sell a few Amazon books out of it in the process (through the built-in Amazon shop/affiliate shceme), then fair enough for paying for the hosting costs.

But for me, the best bit is the KML. Below is a sample of one of my favourite routes on Royal Deeside - Lochnagar - a route I've taken a few times myself (see route description and photos). The routes are coloured according to their grade, from easy to hard, there is the odd photo included plus a few other bits of information including a 'boggyness' scale.

Walkhighlands.co.uk KML sample

So no more excuses about not making it to the hills more often. This weekend I'm going. Honest!

Ski resorts in virtual globes and maps

2008-01-12T23:48:00.000Z

Got ski fever today.. and since I can't afford or have time to jet off in search of snow, I thought I'd do some (web) surfing instead. Below, a bunch of links to some ski resources in Europe, mainly the Alps.

I started looking mainly at the KML out there. One of my favourites is one of the Swiss Alps resort of Zermatt posted by GE Earth Community member TommyAfrika. It shows the location of the various resorts around the region, many of the trails and pistes and best of all, it's in glorious high resolution imagery. Click the thumbnail below for a better view.

Then there's a great KML by SkiBumRick showing resorts in
the Tyrolean Alps. Not so many trails, but certainly a great list of resorts over in Austria.

Eastern Europe is catered for by KML's for both Slovakia and the Czech republic by GEC member maco.

Further afield, in Argentina, Gerardo64 GEC member, has done a trail map overlay of the Cerro Catedral ski centre, Bariloche. It's a nice little KML of a part of the world I haven't done much exploring in. His post is also nicely annotated with photos of the resort, and winter fun!

In terms of a single KML for a huge list of resorts all over the globe, you could do worse than GEC member 1will's placemarks and links to snow reports. Not the most descriptive of placemarks, but there are an awful lot of them!

Finally, the GE blog has some interesting posts on mapping your ski trails in Google Earth using Geovisualiser. His KML is really interesting, and is colourised either by altitude or speed. So take your GPS with you next time you go skiing!

There is of course much more ski related KML out there, and this is just a selection from a few hours I've spent browsing. Sadly, quite a few of the older bigger KML's from a few years ago now have broken links and so have not been included. Couldn't find one for Scotland though..so maybe I should start work on that myself!

New router

2008-01-06T16:02:00.000Z

I've always been a belkin person when it comes to network adaptors and routers, but I've never been happy since I first bought the Wireless G Router ver 4000uk some 18 months ago now. Unlike the previous the ADSL wireless routers I've had in the past this one had just a single aerial, and despite living in a small flat, I found it hard to get a decent signal even in the room next door. My Imp internet radio in the kitchen would frequently buffer mid-stream, and the final icing on the cake was the frequent random disconnects I was getting, whereby the entire router just seemed to drop off-line. I'm sure it's something to do with interference, but after trying to endure it for several months I'd had enough.

In the sales I bought a Buffalo Airstation Wireless-G 125* High Speed Broadband router (WHR-KG54S). It's a typical cable modem router, with the all the general kind of things you'd expect - DCHP server, supporting WPA-PSK (both TKIP and AES, which is useful as I still need TKIP for my internet radio), as well as the older WEP security mode. I haven't really been able to test the High Speed as claimed, mainly because the adaptor included needs USB 2.0 of which I have none! So I'm stuck at 54mbps just like before. Actually the inclusion of 54 in the version number is a bit confusing - perhaps this isn't a 125mbps model at all?!

The Buffalo on the left and the old belkin on the right

Install of the router was a doddle, it detected everything itself. Just a change of security to WPA-PSK at TKIP with my desired password, tweak my original adaptor to the new network name, and done. The default network name of the Buffalo is it's MAC address, which is a bit bizarre, but this can be fairly easily changed using the browser administration utility.

Apparently the router is Nintendo DS compatible (I've not got a multiplayer DS game yet though so I can't test), through AOSS setup button - so I'll see how that works in the future.

I've started using the included network adaptor (Buffalo Turbo-G 125* Wireless USB 2.0 Keychain Adapter), but it behaves no better or worse than my old internal wireless adaptor. The software utility is a bit more user-friendly, but that's it really.

So I'm really quite pleased. It looks good, is very nice narrow and discrete. Easy to set up and great value for money. Router and adaptor for £40.00. And so far it's behaving in terms of the network staying up, remaining on the set channel, interference wise, etc. I guess the only thing I'm wondering is about the rated speed - and how much faster it really is.

New Year and a quick summary of 2007

2008-01-05T12:43:00.000Z

I still can't believe it's 2008 - the past year has gone unbelievably fast. I really haven't had much time to blog, or even keep up on geospatial goings on over the past few months - but I'm going to try and find some more time for that this year!(New Years Resolution)

So since the early months of 2007 I had been working on my masters dissertation which culminated in a submission around the middle of August. I'm playing to put a summary of what I did on this blog (another to do in 2008). In the end while the ultimate aim was to make practical improvements to an online gazetteer service, and bring interoperability to the data structure, it turned out to be a vastly larger task than expected, with a range of issues that XML could either not deal (well) with, or current limitations of the stylesheets (both XSLT and CSS) in reproducing what was required. As such the dissertation became a much more theoretical discussions of the practicalities and implications of converting to an XML basis, without that work having ever been undertaken on the kind of scale that was needed for it to appear in the Gazetteer for Scotland.

In the meantime I was also applying for various jobs locally here in Edinburgh, knowing that after 12 months of student living I really needed some cash fast. I was lucky to be offered an interview the day after my submission (still a bit red-eyed, but luckily not hungover!), and was offered the job shortly after. This meant that the week after I had submitted my final piece of work, I was starting my new job for a small GIS company here in Edinburgh - not a bad turnaround I guess.

I'm really enjoying my job, having been working for the company for some four months now. My role covers a range of areas, from customer support to software installation and setup, software testing and other jobs here and there in between. The diverse nature of what I do, is really what is the best thing about it.

In November I had my graduation (and finally that year long effort was over), which was a lovely day out with parents, girlfriend, fellow students and tutors. I'll post some pictures in due course on my personal blog. Christmas and New year very quiet, but nice - and my little Reciva powered Imp internet radio is still going (!).

Need to catch up with all the other blogs I read soon! Wishing all a happy New Year,

Jan.

Worlds AIDS day 2007

2007-12-01T20:54:00.000Z

Please remember:

Le Tour - Follow the Tour de France on the internet

2007-07-16T09:27:00.000Z

With most of my day spent at uni finishing my dissertation, I've not been able to watch much Tour de France coverage on the TV. However, there are a great bunch of online tools by which you can follow every stage. It's a rest day today, so you won't be able to try these out until tomorow.

First up is the excellent Tour de France KML as posted recently on the Google Earth Blog. This allows you to view each of the tour stages in Google Earth - a real treat with the updated imagery for the Alps, allowing for an immersive 3D view of the alpine (and every other) stage. Frank Taylor (GE Blog) also posted a link to an excellent Google Maps Mashup showing the real time position of a variety of riders and team cars, as well as live information on riders heart-rate, power output and cadence.

In terms of actual race coverage, Eurosport has both the best live text and audio commentary. While the audio stream seems to suffer from over-subscription - at times it is completely unavailable - the live text updates and good graphics demonstrating the real time position of riders on the road and in relation to the stage elevation makes it a very useful tool. They also do live GPS tracking onto a map (a bit similiar to the google mashup, but not nearly as good).

Better yet is the Dutch National Broadcaster who are streaming their coverage of the tour over the internet. For a while the American broadcaster Versus was also streaming coverage, but it seems that they have been forced to close the stream for legal reasons (as reported on cyclingfans.com)

Finally, I haven't yet mentioned the official tour website LeTour.fr, in French, but which is also available in English, German and Spanish. Excellent coverage, in great detail, and full standings, stage overviews and anything else you could possibly want.

Hopefully this will make the internet experience of the cycling fan a bit easier. We still seem to be struggling a bit though - with English audio, tv pictures and commentary hard to come by. I apreciate this is due to the way 'internet' rights are marketed and sold, but it seems ridiculous that in 2007, there is only very limited choice in how we are able to watch the greatest race on earth. As far as I'm aware, nobody even offers pay per view coverage of the race. Any further suggestions, links and comments welcome.

pria.ee - Estonian Agricultural Register and Information Board

2007-07-01T09:48:00.000Z

I haven't blogged for a while - really busy writing up my dissertation. However, I did come across a pretty nifty use of GIS in Estonia. My dad has business interests over there, and he uses the pria.ee GIS service to find out all sorts of things (click on the little map on the RHS). The Estonian Agricultural Register and Information board is the equivalent of a national land registry database, and it allows you to view a variety of data sets down to very fine detail. For instance, individuals land parcels can be viewed, and traced using measuring tools to identify distance or area (very useful for farmers to measure field sizes). Other data sets include the EU's Natura 2000, very high resolution aerial imagery and a raft of others that are listed in Estonian.

The GIS service can be accessed here and currently seems to be in Estonian only.

People's map BETA & new Yahoo maps

2007-05-24T07:21:00.000Z

From an email I received last night, it looks like The XYZ Digital Map Company, a business based up here just outside Edinburgh, have made a new service available called People's Map.

While it looks and feels much like all the other google maps clones, it allows you not only to access the "people's map", a nicely designed map product - but also to access other layers such as the out of copyright 1920's Ordance Survey Map or high resolution getmapping imagery of the entire United Kingdom. Tbe photo below shows the harbour at Portree on the Isle of Skye for instance.

And why is it called People's Map? Well presumeably because XYZ plan to allow people to be able to edit and correct the maps themselves (a bit like wikipedia). Currently this mode isn't available yet, though they allow you to register on the page and be informed when this feature does become available. You can also buy aerial photography of your selected region (via getmapping).

For those wishing to use it as part of their websites, it is possible to pass parameters in the URL. The man behind it all, Tim Rideout, is presenting at the GISupdate conference here at the University next week, so I'm sure I'll hear more about it then.

I wanted to cover the rumour and news of Google buying up all of the SPOT imagery, but can't find anything official on it. Or more substantive. Or I'm not looking hard enough.

Instead, news of Yahoo Maps' fresh new look. Most of the changes are covered on the blog , but it struck me that suddenly the interface feels much cleaner, crisper and ultimately more useable. Glad Google is getting decent competition. Aerial imagery for a lot of Europe is terrible though!

Google Earth Sounds + World Wind Fly thru demo

2007-05-10T18:56:00.000Z

Haven't blogged for ages - sorry! Been very busy with work and endless PERL to do with my dissertation. Should have some stuff to show off with that in the next few weeks.. but in the meantime, I came across a cool news story, and a very nice JAVA world wind demo.

First up is the New Scientist story about a company called wild sanctuary who are working on software to embed these sound files into the relevant locations in Google Earth. The man behind it all, Bernie Krause, has got over 3500 hours of sound recordings from all over the world, taken over 40 years.

Krause plans to have the software ready with 26 sounds for demonstration at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California, on 29 May.

The obvious question is whether users would be able to add their own sounds, and apparently work is underway on a project called Freesound. In any case, fantastic use of sound to create an immersive website, where so many have failed in the past (remember the dreadfull embedded Midi files?).

Next up the New Look The Earth is Square has links and screenshots for a World Wind JAVA demo, created by a company called DiSTI. I've been frustrated all day at uni trying to get it to work, and although I can get the fighter jet to appear, I don't get any of the landscapes. Not sure what the problem is (I presume port blocking), but now that I'm home, I've really enjoyed flying over real life locations (even if they are limited to a choice of around 5 or 6 at present). So nip over to Earth is Square for a preview, or jump straight in through this link.

Virtual Globes, Google EULA, and Gazetteer XML considerations

2007-04-06T13:36:00.000Z

I missed out on going to the "Geobrowsing Workshop" held at the University of Cambridge last week, but I came across this interesting review of it by Eddy Boyle who I believe works over at Edina, a spin-off service from the Edinburgh University's Data Library.

Then yesterday one of my classmates' (who incidently knows Eddy Boyle) and I were having a discussion about the use of Google's images and their EULA. Odd, as Bull's World did a post on exactly what we were speaking about, followed up by the news that Ed Parsons was joining Google, which in turn was followed up by Spatially Adjusted's obvious request!

What am I up too? Well, I'm trying to finalise the planning of the XML 'grammar' I'm going to use. It's swinging either the way of Linda Hill's Alexandria's Digital Library Project, that being a light-weight gazetteer which we can supply for the world to use. We've got probably the most extensive set of gazetteer data for Scotland, so it's certainly a service that could prove interesting to other users - in a similiar way to how geonames currently works.

The problem is that the Gazetteer for Scotland is much more than a simple place/feature gazetteer, containing vast volumes of other descriptive information, photographs and other media. Clearly this isn't something we can serve to the world directly (copyright issues), and yet it's important that these elements can be adequately represented in the XML structure.

Anyway, once we've decided we'll start working on adapting a few perl scripts to draw the data out into our XML, and then the fun begins of stylesheet transformations etc.

April catch up - Glencoe, FutureTV and news.

2007-04-02T19:34:00.000Z

I've been pretty busy over the past month or so - and I've just realised I haven't done any blogging. That doesn't mean I've ditched my course, or even been on holiday (much), just that the time has flown by!

So, a quick catch up. First, three fellow students are doing Gazetteer for Scotland topics, and we have a combined questionaire on the ScotGaz website to try and get some customer feedback. Some criticism of it too, as apparently I left no space to comment or suggest educational ideas. My fault, though I'll happily take suggestions here, in addition to the comments and emails ive already received.

As a class we had a brief three day holiday in Glencoe, Western Scotland. Had a really good time, with fantastic scenery and even a day on the slopes! I'll post more photos on my website in the near future.

River Coe, Glencoe.

Ben Nevis from Aonoch Mor

Anyway, back to some links related to my dissertation, and to start one that really isn't!

Firstly, Hey What's That.com that I blogged about before, has now made their viewshed analysis tool available to the rest of the World. Some of the data is a bit crumbly, and not nearly as accurate for most of Europe as it is in the U.S. but for some locations most noticeably The Alps and other hi-res areas around the world it works a treat. For instance, this is the view from West Lomond in Fife. Bit odd you can't see much east, because the other summit East Lomond, really isn't that imposing!

- Ogle Earth mentioned a really interesting project involving the visualisation of non-spatial data in Google Earth, and some similiar work involving Second Life. Worth a read.

- A bit off-topic but related to above, Microsoft Virtual Earth April Fool's Joke! but also a huge update (UK included) a few days previous. Cool.

Oh and I almost forgot, one of our lecturers, talks on UK Future TV.com about The Future of mapping in the digital age

Viewshed calculations HeyWhatsThat, Dull and XML editors

2007-03-15T00:30:00.000Z

Ogle Earth finds another gem in the form of HeyWhatsThat.com, which uses the SRTM data that is available with GE, to perform viewshed calculations. It can output directly to Google Maps, where it draws a 360 degree panorama that interacts with the google map interface. It also identifies the peaks visible from your position, and you can highlight the entire viewshed in red.

You can also import the entire set into Google Earth, to, I suppose test if the algorithm is correct. Very very cool.

Another useful thing I saw related to education, was a post on slashgeo.org concerning the use of Skype to control virtual globes on another computer. Unype allows two (or more?) users to interact with each others globe, showing them around, and so on. GE Blog reviews and also has a video.

But anyway, after having criticised the Gazetteer for Scotland in an earlier post, I suppose I had better make amends! I was of course referring to the village of Dull in Perth and Kinross. *cough*

I did some work getting XLST to work today, with limited success. I did after hacking up a quick XML sample of one of the Gazetteers pages, manage to reproduce a html document with some images from that XML source using XLST. The plan is to produce some samples for use in my presentation on Monday, perhaps an html document with two seperate stylesheets, and maybe KML, to demonstrate how powerful XSLT can be.

The only major problem I've had is in my search for a good editor. I decided to start off simple with Microsoft's XML Notepad 2007 . At first glance it did exactly what I wanted it for, but it has some really annoying bugs, especially that you need to close and re-open the XSLT stylesheet everytime you want to re-transform (the copy must be cached inside). So that was useless.

I then tried Oxygen. This was complete at the other end of the scale. Not only do I just get a 30 day trial, but it's also so incredibly complex with so much functionality that I really don't need. Having said that, it worked quite nicely if you ignore _all_ the functions and just use it as an editor, and as a tool for running the XSLT.

Anyone have better suggestions?

Google Lit Trips, Meteox, and the beautiful Alps

2007-03-11T15:02:00.000Z

Just as was trying to explain how virtual globes can lead narratives, Ogle Earth links to GoogleLitTrips.org, a really nice example of how we can use visualisations to aid within wider education, in this case renowned literary works.

Then my dad pointed me towards meteox.co.uk which despite the URL seems to be a Dutch site that uses both google and geodan maps to display rainfall (radar) across europe. It also does the (now) obligatory Google Earth KMZ link for all the data, though while it updates hourly, it doesn't allow for time-led animations in the same way the maps do.

Finally, I never wrote about it, but various sources reported the huge update to Google Earth and especially the Swiss Alps. Some of the new imagery draped over the elevation data reproduces some of the stunning scenery. Now, just to have the time and the money to head in search of the snow!

While I was exploring, anyone know what kind of rock turned up red and blue on the imagery though?

Oh and some final quick links for reference:
- Ogle Earth and KML editors
- Earth is square on MapleCroft Maps

Dissertation idea request? Virtual globes and education.

2007-03-09T16:38:00.000Z

I've cross-posted this a bit, and it's related to my dissertation. Feedback really apreciated, especially from those who aren't ordinarily my blog readers :)

Hi everyone,

I promised I'd complete this over the weekend - typically it ran over into this week, and I've only just managed to send it out now. Apologies. If you don't have time to look at this, or give feedback, then please don't worry.

For those of you that don't know my background, I'm currently undertaken a Masters of Science in Geographical Information Science (GIS) in Edinburgh. GIS very roughly is about how we can use technology to represent geographical information. Anyway, as part of my masters I need to produce a dissertation. Read on :)

The website is called The Gazetteer for Scotland - feel free to take a quick look. As you can see, it's quite dull, but does contain a vast amount of information on all kinds of things to do with Scotland.

This is an encyclopedic website run by a few staff members and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and it is my job to translate this website in such a way that it can be used within education. I won't bore you with the technical details, but I propose to use something like Google Earth as a platform to represent the data that currently is on the website, and tailor it to aid teaching.

Why a virtual globe such as Google Earth? Well, traditional web-sites are becoming fairly boring, especially when set up in Gazetteer fashion - especially to kids. A tool such as Google Earth is an easy to use and interesting way of engaging an audience, and allows data to be represented at different dimensions within space and time.

How exactly is where I need some help and suggestions. I know what I can do from a technical perspective, but I'm not really too sure how this all fits into practice. If you can help me with a few of these questions, I would be most grateful. Of course, other comments, suggestions and issues are welcome.

- What sort of age-group, ability level do you think I could target something like this at?
- What kind of information is interesting, or relevant? What kind of theme do you think would be interesting to develop?
- How would a demonstration work in practice with respect to certain age groups? Should you demonstrate, or provide laboratory sessions?

Clearly content is related to the age, and the age and ability level will dictate whether this is an effective tool.

Some ideas I have already:

- Creating a historical narrative, that leads you around areas of Scotland through time.
- Quiz/ Fact-Finding tutorial allowing them to explore Scotland and the Gazetteer data set.

Can you help? Please PM me back, leave comments, or email me :)
--email address removed--

I've used Google Earth as the example, though I will probably use World Wind. I'm starting work on the content very soon - so should have something to show in the very near future.

Exploratory Data Analysis - GeoDA & Cartograms

2007-02-28T19:30:00.000Z

My final piece of coursework due is an exercise on Exploratory Data analysis. We've used the Geoda package previously, and doing some analysis on health data derived on the Birmingham area, using census data.

There was an article in the The Times on Monday where they wrote a very interesting story about using cartograms and some of the work Danny Dorling is doing on them. He has a really interesting website - Worldmapper.org- and one of his maps relating the size of the country to it's population is shown below.

Pretty cool stuff.

Voronoi and end of week update

2007-02-24T12:31:00.000Z

It's Saturday at last! A rather hectic week has past with this tricky paper on KML finally handed in. I attempted to cover coordinate transformations between different projections, and how KML might handle such an issue.

I managed to cover enough luckily without having to delve into some of the complex equations that you need to use. My main point, is that rather than have the client (GE etc.) interpret different notations of coordinate tags, which is probably unlikely, it may be possible to build these complex transformations into the XSLT that you would use to transform your XML data source into KML...?

Now I've just to do a small essay on using Virtual Worlds to aid teaching, a small exploratory data analysis exercise..and I'm finally done with courses and can focus on my dissertation.

Before heading out last night and consuming a few too many beers, I went to the Edinburgh Earth Observatory/AGI weekly seminar, which this week featured Chris Gold, EU Marie Curie chair at Glamorgan University and Voronoi Evangelist!. For such a potentially dry subject, focussing on algorithms, he made it remarkeably interesting, and is an excellent speaker. For those interested, Glamorgan University is hosting the Fourth Annual Symposium on Voronoi Diagrams

Finally, related to my dissertation, Earth is square links to an excellent article about using WW in the classroom.

About Sedna & KML coordinate musings

2007-02-20T20:35:00.000Z

As I said in my previous post - there have been no further updates since boxing day on the shearwater whose progress I've been following. Knowing that GPS receivers don't transmit very well underwater, I had somehow just assumed that was the most likely cause - either by the device coming off, or a tragic event befalling our Sedna.

I emailed the team over at seaturtle.org and they had a far simpler, more obvious explaination.

There is a simple reason that you have stopped getting updates
on the shearwater tracks...batteries. Turtles are large and able to carry
transmitters with large batteries that will last a long time. Birds,
unfortunately, can only be tracked with short-lifespan tags due to weight
limitations. Sedna's battery was supposed to last only 90 days and we tracked
her for 118 days which we were very happy about!

Cheers, Rob

Good stuff!

Also for my geoinformatics essay I'm looking at a limitation within KML. Related to my dissertation on the Gazetteer for Scotland we are having a few issues converting from other map projections into what I assume to be GE projection datum (WGS84?). Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow auto-calculate/convert from say, British National Grid, straight into lat long coordinates. Sadly, it all doesn't seem quite as simple.. though the OS does a great booklet explaining some of the problems and limitations.

Finally, a great link I found to using virtual globes in the classroom.