Kartograph

Moved!

2008-12-28T06:07:00.001+05:00

This project is very much alive and has moved to: http://pkmaps.freeforums.org

Close

2006-07-03T16:09:00.000+05:00

I called up the WorldCall center a couple of days ago to have the guy come and fix the cable TV line at our place. The return call I got today to ask for directions was a little surprising though.

WorldCall already has a complete addressing and routing geodatabase of Karachi. Why in the world would they ask for directions? Besides, I could tell from the way the lady who called me was talking on the phone that she already had some sort of map in front of her, 'cause she knew all the names of the adjacent streets, that the place next to ours was empty and that behind our place was a small so-called college. Those guys have plotted every bit of pole and lining from their satellite photography. Boy, do I envy them!

But, what the heck, they are a public limited company and got all the resources they need. I just need to work on mine.

Predicament

2006-07-02T01:14:00.000+05:00

Finally, I get over with the semester. Phew!

But as one problem gets solved, another one comes up. Karachi's electric power supply is a mess. We are lucky to have electricty for the greater part of the day, but the way in which it comes and goes is so irritating, one can't get anything done at all. Add to that the frustration of getting 120 volts instead of 220, that not only disrupts every electrical equipment, but damages them in the process. Been going on for more than a month now and there's no stoppage in sight.

I almost lost a brand new hard drive to that dwindling electric supply and there's no guarantee I wouldn't lose anything else in the future. But such is life in Karachi these days.

Anyway, the project definitely needs a separate website and a lot more attention. Yet finances just keep getting in the way. I'll have to see what I can do. desimaniac: I shall let you know if I need that hosting. Thanks!

I need to fix the map's georeferencing now. Should be done as soon as there's a stable power supply. It lasted long enough for me to be able to make this post and I should consider myself lucky.

GEupdate

2006-06-11T14:20:00.001+05:00

Google made a HUGE update to its satellite imagery database this weekend. Other than the previously covered cities of Karachi and Islamabad, we now have even a larger area around Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Hyderabad, Multan, Sialkot, and so many other major and minor areas of Pakistan. The strips of hi-res data are scattered all over and the names are too many to list.

Have a look. Download and run Google Earth from here.

Pegged

2006-05-22T16:52:00.000+05:00

This follows the discussion at the Karachi MetBlog.

Thanks to Khurram for lending me his BT GPS. Have been taking GPS coordinates on and off these past few days as I got the chance. A few turned out to be useless, though. The GPS (as I later discovered) needed some seconds to get settled on the EXACT coordinates for that location while I noted them down a tad earlier.

Tests, quizes, assignments galore, as usual. 5 weeks of more crazy cramming up to do.

Meanwhile I have been preparing some mapping reading material I would want to go through after the semester to make sure I get the roads editing and navigation stuff going smoothly. Will inshAllah get to that soon as well.

Black

2006-02-23T01:29:00.000+05:00

I halted work on the Google Earth KML last month. I was just so disappointed with everyone's response.

Nonetheless, Karachi's routing and navigation is in the works. So it is for Lahore and Islamabad. MapQuest type webmaps are also good to go. Not to forget to mention traffic monitoring and vehicle license plate recognition are in the pipeline.

Even though it would only be a matter of a few days for the online map server to get running, I just don't see the incentive for spending all that time and money for doing so. People just take and run away.

Categorized

2006-01-08T22:13:00.000+05:00

Here's one with the latest edits: Karachi.kmz

Contains 600+ placemarks for Karachi in Google Earth.

Coloured

2006-01-01T15:06:00.000+05:00

I added the "Union Councils" and "Towns" layer from the geodatabase to the KML. Needless to say, it looks awesome. Still has the data shift problem though:

I shall add the above and release the KML soon.

First

2005-12-30T19:28:00.000+05:00

A preliminary release to give you guys an idea. Has about 600+ placemarks and still needs a lot of work.

Have a look: Karachi.kmz

Blue

2005-12-29T20:41:00.000+05:00

I imported a few roads from the geodatabase to GE. Turns out, there's a slight problem with the georeferencing. Have a look:

I shall import the roads to the KML as soon as I fix this.

Excel

2005-12-29T19:50:00.000+05:00

I have been collecting KMLs from throughout the Google Earth community BBS. I shall post a combined KML with atleast 500 placemarks shortly. There's a lot of inconsistency and uncategorization in them to clean up.

The cleaning up in GE is a headache as you can't even select multiple placemarks at a time. So I started opening up the KMLs as text in EditPad, stripping off the extra formatting, importing to Excel and doing mass editing there. Finally, it's just a copy-paste to a text file which I then save as a KML.

There are already lots of categories, like schools, hospitals, parks, dinning areas etc. But I shall be taking them further by adding descriptions, wiki links (if they exist), phone nos, web links, ATM networks, bank branches, etc.. Takes only an hour or so to customise the excel file and a few more to sort them out. So hold on to your mice till you see what's in store for the future.

Blink

2005-12-28T19:30:00.000+05:00

It's great to be back again! Things got sort of rough with the last blog (at pnec.blogspot.com) and it had to go. This time, InshAllah, things shall go a lot smoother.

The GIS (Geographical Information Systems) industry grew in great proportions this year. The best thing to happen, by far, was obviously Google Earth. It brought GIS to the masses and, well, made my job so much easier. ;)

Back to business. Here are the goals I feel we need to be able to accomplish to some extent.

Goal 1 - Make a great map for Karachi. And I do mean a REALLY great map for Karachi. The current ones suck. We all know that. Most are made by hand, and local maps with hand calligraphy just plain... well, suck! Our map will be different. It can come out as a PDF for the PC, on paper for the road, as JPG for the geeks on the road, or on GPS for the uber geeks on the road, or as KMLs for those who just don't have anything better to do.

Goal 2 - Make sure the above works. Ok, just kidding! No... I don't mean that. Ofcourse, the map will work. What I'm trying to say is that it should be an 'intelligent' map that can tell you directions or give alternate routes... things like that. Now wouldn't that be cool?

But hang on. The former's easy. It's the latter that becomes difficult. It would require making a geographical database and creating geometrical networks in feature datasets and feature classes and tables and relationship classes with points, polygons, lines, and [put boring terminology summation here].

The latter also requires satellite photography which I am currently on to. I just finished caching the entire high-res area for Karachi in GE using a little bit of both 1st semester computers 101 and Microsoft Excel for dummies tricks. [Took me 10 weeks to tell myself that I had to do something about it, 10 minutes to figure it out and 1 minute to implement it... relativity isn't so bad after all.] I'll let the screenshot give you guys a hint.

My next goal now is to extract the sat. photos. Got a few DirectX tricks up my sleeve which I shall try in a day or two [unless a friend unknowingly entices me into buying that GeForce 5200 and playing HL2]. But that's all about goal no. 2.

Goal 1's all about data collection. And GE is the tool for the job. GE's free, and everyone's got it, and that should make it so much easier. But unfortunately, being free isn't really the best thing. Only GE Plus and Pro allow the creation of lines and polygons (read: roads and houses). Placemarks just don't have it in them. But since we don't have any choice, I guess we'll have to make do with them.

So here's the deal.

We'll now start on working on 1 KML. This will be THE Karachi KML. I mean, it's going to be more detailed than any other city KML you have seen before. For that to happen, everybody will need to pool in data. Since everybody can use GE, anybody can contribute.

If you're thinking about how that KML's going to be useful in creating maps in other formats, I'll reveal that soon. Meanwhile, give your comments on what you think about the project.