spring 2007 research

Patrick saving the day again!

2007-06-13T23:37:00.000-05:00

cool - thanks to my brother, people are now able to choose which color their point should be. PATRICK - YOU ROCK!

Qmaps, prison maps, and our progress report

2007-06-13T14:53:00.000-05:00

Qmaps allows you to build your own custom map editor. Way beyond what we are doing, but inspiring. The Tunisian Prisoners Map shows two-tabbed info windows with video from YouTube, and other variations. How hard will it be to incorporate video to our map?
The kml for the watershed outline works, but the clipped municipal and county boundaries files are still too big to load. we will have to figure out something else.

Toggle my KML

2007-06-12T14:46:00.000-05:00

The raster KML works on our practice map with a simple toggle function. We created KML files of political boundaries related to the watershed, but they are too big to load. We will clip by watershed and try again.
Almost all images are matched with lat and long, resized and ready for uploading.
Finally we have mousewheel zoom.

working for Riverkeeper June 11 - 15

2007-06-11T12:16:00.000-05:00

we are finishing up details in preparation to actually handing over the map to the Riverkeeper organization. although we haven't gotten it to work on our site yet, here's what the kml image overlay looks like when we tested it on maps.google.com:

review with Sarah

2007-05-08T17:41:00.000-05:00

Our jpg KML works in maps.google.com but not in our google maps mashup. we think it has something to do with the image file so we will try to use a vector shapefile (municipalities, for instance) to create another KML. It also could be a version issue, but we're not sure so this would help us figure it out. another way to trouble shoot would be to test other image overlay KMLs...
superProf Sean White has made it possible for us to upload to the server he set up with tomcat so we have some more jsp fun ahead of us.

Things left to do: (revised, smaller expectations)
add all images
figure out vector kml
give it to Riverkeeper and talk to their IT guys about how they want to go ahead.

another great googlemaps link

Jeremiah at the Electronic Data Service

2007-05-08T08:04:00.000-05:00

EDS has the KML extension for GIS that we don't have permissions to install here, so we went over to Lerner Library and Jeremiah helped us migrate a piece of the DEM into KML. Some trickiness with raster calculator - we had to make each cell value an integer so image processing software could read the tif, so it could be resaved as a smaller quality jpg.
our first try at bringing river.kml into googlemaps resulted in only a marker being generated instead of the whole image. This is what we're working on now, testing the kml by pasting it into the search box on www.maps.google.com.

We made a new home page which unifies the presentation of our efforts. We also added a field to the form reading code so now we have "image", "source", and "location URL" as fields to be filled in. We have formatted the entire text file so that all our GPSd points load in the main map, although we still need to add in all the image URLs.

recap - what's left to do:

2007-04-12T14:11:00.000-05:00

Google just released "MyMaps" which looks great.
here's our to do list, since we have to let this sit until the studio finishes:
1. migrate town and village boundaries shapefile through Google earth pro to KML. add to map as using GeoRSS overlay.
2. learn how to use different icons that people can choose by category.
3. customize the appearance of the info window.
4. combine php with jsp - will need help on that one.
5. replace the text file with an updated csv file.

its go time....in 10 days.

superProf Sean White

2007-04-02T16:11:00.000-05:00

Prof. Sean White is seriously helping us out and put the wms-gmap example from lamatek on a server that we can practice on.
next on the list - can we get the php and the jsp examples working together?

in moderation

2007-04-02T10:04:00.000-05:00

here's a screen shot of the "accept/deny" info window on the moderation page, and some of the php that my brother wrote.

with a little help from my friends

2007-04-01T22:45:00.000-05:00

two people, my brother Patrick and Columbia Professor Sean White are helping out the cause this week. Sean is setting up a server that will run JSP for us to demo on and Patrick is writing php to record points and descriptions added by visitors to the map. he is also enabling moderation for points added by the general public. we are grateful.

WMS

2007-03-29T13:36:00.000-05:00

we learned today that it is possible to pull direclty from a WMS server into GoogleMaps. this is so much better than any placed overlay could be.
examples: js taglibrary, geoskating, and Hack#65 from the GoogleMaps Hacks Book, although the referenced sites don't work anymore which makes it hard to use their method. Here's a maintained list of many, many publicly accessible Web Mapping Servers all over the world.
we are also recovering from an attempt to use a flash template with an embedded google map, so currently www.lizbarry.com/map.html, /basic.html, /remedial.html, and /E_inserts.html are all wonky.

uh oh

2007-03-29T21:39:00.000-05:00

just learned that our host, 1&1, doesn't support java. or at least not in the package we have. apparently we'll need to install tomcat so that we can run a webserver on our computer and demo the JSP Taglibrary which we are currently very interested in. we're trying to figure it out.

kml

2007-03-29T08:03:00.000-05:00

we are using Google Earth Pro to move our GIS shapefiles into kml files which overlay on GoogleMaps. Hopefully, our points will be accurately displayed independently of the DEM overlay being turned on or off.

viva spring!

2007-03-22T16:51:00.000-05:00

We're just getting back into mapping after midterms, sickness and a spring "break" full of scholarship applications, portfolios and job applications.
today we overlaid a low-res test of our GIS onto our google maps with the Einsert javascript. It's still not perfectly aligned. we started looking into "pinning" our map overlay onto Gmaps by lat/long of each corner point. that way we can avoid the "zoom level" issue.
we downloaded a flash extension from AFcomponents.com that inserts googlemaps into a flash document. nice, but we don't see how we can add points or make it our own.
we added the first 50 points to MyAtlas in a .csv file, but the info windows aren't working well for some reason. one new decision: we have decided not to use MyAtlas alone because in the end it will become limiting.

in the next week we hope to incorporate our complete list of sites in the csv file, learn how to tell our site to call up that file and display the points, and assign color coded markers indicating the specific site uses. also further development of our layout and include detailed descriptions and images (provided we can find the files) of each site. after we can show this up and running we will tackle user added points. but for now, one step at a time.

renewed effort

2007-03-01T11:28:00.000-05:00

ok. we actually got the einserts to work, and anticipate that we will be able to add our custom GIS map overlays to the google maps.
we reprojected our GIS map to the same mercator projection as googlemaps.
we want to be able to turn our overlays on and off with simple buttons.
at this point, clicking on the map adds a marker, and clicking on the marker removes it. these markers are not saved when the map is refreshed, nor can anyone else see them.
next we will try to make it possible for users to add their points on the map and add content for everyone to see. the moderation feature in MyAtlas is really nice, and we would like to do something of the same.

an evening with E-Inserts

2007-02-21T22:26:00.000-05:00

we decided that we should give the EInsert method a second try. 3 hours later, although we learned a lot, we still haven't gotten it to work. also, we were looking for how to display the latitude and longitude of the mouse location as it pans over the map. we haven't found out how yet.

take two

2007-02-19T20:17:00.000-05:00

our latest thoughts are that we need to split our mapping needs in two. MyAtlas will work great for the interactive mapping (it has moderation and bulk uploading built-in), and we can make a separate interface in flash where people can turn on and off GIS layers and see video of each point.

although it would be awesome, tiling our GIS layers onto the googlemaps would take a long time for us to figure out, and we wouldn't be able to create an interface for uploading content that is as nice and simple as MyAtlas can provide.

so, google maps can be really interactive, and flash makes a really beautiful interface. we think we'll try to have the googlemaps load inside of our flash frame.

thanks from the advice Brody!

more ideas for googlemaps

2007-02-18T09:51:00.000-05:00

our advisor Sarah sent us this link on adding overlay images to a googlemap that are georeferenced and scalable when zooming. this opened up a world of learning about tiling and georeferencing custom overlay images - thank you Mapki!
Adding Your Own Custon Map
Automatic Tile Cutters

today we added the most basic geocoder to our map.

on Friday we ordered two books: googlemaps hacks and web mapping illustrated. it seems like an "add your own points and data" gmap mashup as well as a flash/GIS presentation of the virtual tour are needed.

our base map

2007-02-15T20:47:00.000-05:00

this map shows counties by population density overlaid on the national elevation dataset for the hudson river watershed.

in our 4 days on the Riverkeeper boat back in September, we GPS'd Riverkeeper's anecdotal knowledge of hot spots along the river according to the following categories: industrial sites, brownfields, active water-based businesses, new developments, proposed developments, soft sites, public water access, public land. These points can be displayed in the same GIS map from which this jpeg was created.

week 1

2007-02-06T14:13:00.000-05:00

erick and i have just gotten started researching web mapping. we need to develop an interactive mapping component for the Riverkeeper website as well as deliver the virtual tour of the river that we filmed back in september. My brother suggested we start with the google maps api....

here's what we're currently thinking about features:

2007-02-15T15:07:00.000-05:00

1. people need to be able to add their points onto one community map. Riverkeeper wants to tap into the "networked public" to multiply their eyes and eyes on pollution and development. also they want to allow more participation in their work, since they can't continue to do it all themselves.

2. their map points, whether they are about pollution, development, or other conditions, need to link with other info such as text, video, pics, and with a space for others to add their comments and discussion.

3. we need some way to visualize the political landscape: for example, showing where development regulations vary by town, city, municipality or county. This is key, because the end goal is to make the case for comprehensive watershed development guidelines at the state level.

4. there may need to be a separate "virtual tour" of the river. we have video and pics of each of the 500 points we documented. we previously mocked up the video clips playing in the boat window of the riverkeeper vessel in flash, and these video clips would have to be called by clicking points on a map. we like how this looks, but it would be basically its own presentation. this is also going to be time-consuming, because the video hasn't been cut yet.

5. we also have a lot of GIS information that might be nice to present in layers that can be turned on and off.

week 3

2007-02-15T14:04:00.000-05:00

the googlemapsmania is the best web resource for google mapping we've found

we are also getting aquainted with google maps API

mashable has contributed to our understanding of social networking

these are some sites we've been comparing the use of flash vs GIS vs google earth mashups:
yellow arrow
faneuil media
wayfaring
wikimapia
panoramio
frappr
mappy hour
NY Times Katrina Map (now disabled)
myatlas

this blog entry helped by comparing features among sites