Spatially Adjusted

Tag: google earth

  • Brian Flood continues his look at Google Earth

    Link – Google Earth Continued

    I’ve recently seen various forum and blog posts about Google Earth moving into traditional GIS territory. In some regards this is true, GE is a very fast, very internet friendly, very ubiquitous geospatial viewer that provides a whole globe full of free base data. However, it is not a very good GIS platform from a cartographic, analysis or geoprocessing standpoint, in fact it doesn’t do any of these. From a GIS perspective, it’s just a viewer. A very good viewer with excellent hooks for additional data streams but a viewer none the less.

    Brian has a nice look at moving from ArcMap to Google Earth as a GIS Viewer. My first reaction is that this is huge because there really isn’t a good free viewer available to view GIS data from desperate sources. The flexibility of KML is really starting to show, but the Table of Contents still isn’t my cup of tea (I guess I’m just used to the ArcMap one). I hope ESRI can get ArcExplorer out before people get comfortable using Google Earth to share their datasets.

    It is unfortunate that ESRI felt the need to charge for ArcPublisher as ArcReader could have been a pretty good choice as a GIS viewer application, but since you need an extension to create readable map documents it isn’t really free.

  • Andrew Hallam’s Google Earth Wishlist

    Links – Google Earth Wishlist – Part 1 & Google Earth Wishlist – Part 2

    While playing with the free version of Google Earth I started a list of enhancements that I’d like to see in the product. The desired outcome is to make it easier to use Google Earth as a spatial data delivery platform, without impacting on the collective end user experience.

    Andrew’s writeup on Google Earth is excellent. Part 1 looks at KML and many improvements that would make using it much easier. Part 2 looks at Network Links, which at least for me has been the most confusing part of Google Earth. I guess I just don’t grab the logic of how it works, but I’m sure as time goes on Keyhole will improve it. I’m looking forward to Part 3 which should arrive later on WMS in Google Earth.

  • Live WMS Data Inside Google Earth

    Link – Adding WMS overlays to Google Earth

    Chris posts some code to take WMS server output and overlay it inside Google Earth.

    To give a bit of background on how the following code works, Google Earth has the ability to send the bounding box coordinates of your current view to a file, or webpage. Now, for those people whose light bulbs arent going off, this means it is quite easy to create a small bit of code to capture these bbox coordinates and transform them into a WMS request. The WMS output can then be overlaid quite accurately with GE’s sat imagery and tilted, zoomed to your hearts content.

  • Stefan Reacts to David Maguire’s Blog Entry

    Link – It’s social software

    Stefan Geens read David’s post and has an interesting take on it. Stefan doesn’t know much about GIS and even admits it, so his viewpoint is from an “ESRI outsider”.

    Maguire implies that Google Earth and its ilk are a fad, a bubble, and rhetorically wonders why people have written about it. He can think of six reasons: It’s Google, it’s free, it’s easy, it’s detailed, it’s fast and it’s different, (but read the post yourself).

    That’s sort of stunning, because to me, the most important reason why Google Earth and Maps are a runaway success is not on his list: It’s social software. Google Earth is an extremely compelling canvas that people are using to link their experiences in the real world to the web.

    That is an interesting thought. I’ve always thought of GIS software as social, but it appears some programs are more than others. ESRI always preaches GIS for the people and it seems that message is not getting out very far beyond Redlands. I can’t wait to see what Jack (Dangermond – Founder and President of ESRI for those who don’t know) and David have in store for us at the UC.

  • David Maguire Talks About Google Earth

    Geographic Exploration – The New Fad?

    David Maguire has written another blog post and he gives us his thoughts on Google Earth, MSN, Yahoo! and others who have entered the GIS arena. Personally I’m glad to see he gets why the others have been successful (ease of use, global data, branding) and he lets us know what concerns he has for the future of these system. I tend to agree with him that once you get past the hype, these are very basic programs or APIs, but we need to keep in mind that most of these are either beta or version 1.0 of their releases. ESRI needs to move the bar forward so that there is a gap between the hype and their products. Sounds like David or Jack will make an announcement at ESRI about their plans. Hopefully the ArcWeb Services team will be on stage at that point or even a new product.

    Good to see a strategic blog post by David. Do you disagree with him? Just blog about it because I’m sure he’d love to see feedback from the users.

  • Jason Wants to Know how to get Shapefile Points into Google Earth

    Link: Shapefile points to GPX in Google Earth.

    I managed to get a long list of ESRI ArcGIS shapefile points converted into the free version of Google Earth.

    It was more of a work-around than any brilliance on my part. If you could think of an easier way to do it, I’m all ears.

    Has anyone developed an easy way to do this?

  • The Cost of ESRI Products Causes Potential Users to Turn Elsewhere

    Link: Guns, Germs, and Steel and GMaps Census (dead link).

    “A quick word on GIS software: ESRI’s ArcGIS is the industry standard, but it can be a challenge to learn and costs way too much. My wife, who does some GIS in her research at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, has recently become a big fan of another software called Maptitude. It’s extremely intuitive and an order of magnitude cheaper than ArcGIS.”

    I posted about this a couple weeks ago as well as my posts about opening up ArcWeb Services to more users. People want to use ESRI products, but the first word out of their mouths is always it costs too much and in many cases it does. ArcExplorer is about the only free tool that ESRI offers to get into GIS. Compared to products such as Google Earth and the many open source GIS tools, it is very weak and not worth mentioning.

    It appears that most users are willing to spend about $500 for a professional GIS system, but their choices are very limited.

  • NASA World Wind – Better than Google Earth?

    Link: Wayne Graham’s Blog: World Wind.

    Boy talk about bad timing. NASA’s World Wind is pretty much the same type of application as ArcGlobe or Google Earth, but unlike either of those two, it is open source. Right away you notice one feature that Google Earth does not have is Web Mapping Server (WMS) support. In addition to that killer function, World Wind also includes LandSat7 imagery, USGS Digital Ortho, USGS Topo and even MODIS. It isn’t a small install at 180 megs, but given the community that has sprung up around it you’ll have even more to download. Plus unlike Google Earth, World Wind’s digital models are as impressive as anything I’d expect from ArcGlobe.

  • Business Week on Google Earth

    Link: Google’s Magic Carpet Ride (dead link)

    “Too many products, too little time is the story of my working life. So it’s not often that I play with a product for a few hours in the office, then take it home and spend another hour or so showing it off. But that’s what happened with Google Earth. I’m not quite sure yet what this satellite imaging program is good for or how it will make money, but it sure is fun.”

    An interesting take on Google Earth from someone who isn’t either a programmer or a GIS professional. As he says, “..download it and take an advance tour of this summer’s vacation trip or check out your childhood neighborhood. You’ll likely find it addictive.” which leads me to believe that we’ll see more information (ads) for businesses in Google Earth in the future. Could Google Earth be the next version of Yellow Pages? Imagine the 3D models of buildings colored because certain companies paid for inclusion. Interesting thoughts…

  • Users debate costs of Google Earth vs. ArcGIS

    Konquest Online posts about their thoughts on Google Earth (dead link):

    “I think that GIS producers should be humbled by the work that has been done at
    Google and Keyhole. It’s not perfect yet, but it was developped in about one
    year, has a great interface and is free. I’ve only downloaded Google Earth, but
    they also offer the software in two other flavours: Google Earth Plus (which features GPS integration, higher print resolution and more powerful annotation features) and Google Earth
    Pro     (with a ton of features and can be compared with commercial GIS) But the Pro version is still priced only 400 US$/year, compared to the 10 000+ $ needed to acquire ESRI’s ArcGIS.”

    While I too am quite impressed at the ease of use that Google Earth brings to desktop GIS, lets not lose site of the fact that is is only a viewer of GIS. ArcGIS, while more expensive allows GIS analysis as well as viewing the same and more GIS datasets that Google Earth does. Also ArcView is “only” about $1,500 and the 3D Analyst extension is about “$2,500”, much less that the $10,000+ figure quoted above. To compare Google Earth with ArcGIS is about the same as comparing Word Pad with Microsoft Word. To even list all the functions that ArcView does beyond Google Earth would take pages on pages of this blog. Don’t lose sight of the purpose of Google Earth, nor what ArcGIS is about.