Virtual Globes, Google EULA, and Gazetteer XML considerations

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.

Dissertation idea request? Virtual globes and education.

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.

Google and Microsoft take to the skies for Australia Day

The Earth is square blog highlights an interesting google maps implementation. I suppose I never really thought about the fact that your data source need not be maps, or aerial imagery, but could be anything really.. This one: Google World Domination!

Also from this very interesting blog, was a write-up of his experiences at the Digital Globe Conference. He has posted the presentation he used, and might be an interesting contact when it comes to considering my GE/WW/whatever else remake of the Gaz data.

The other interesting piece of information I found on the GE Blog was some competition between Microsoft and Google during Australia Day 2007. Having been in Sydney for Australia day last year.. it's pretty cool that both these big companies are using this as a publicity stunt, that should create some great imagery. As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald The Microsoft Virtual Earth blog also reports that they have created a special map showing Australia Day events right across Australia.

-EDIT - There was a huge Virtual Earth update a few days ago, covering some fantastic European Cities. You'll need to install the plugin though.

arcExplorer & backseat gaming

Before we move onto the big news of the past few days, let me first talk about an interesting article that I read about on slashgeo. BackSeat Playground is a project sponsored by Microsoft and the Ordnance Survey, that plans to utilise GPS and ICE (in car entertainment), in the form of a video game, that relates a narrative on the basis of geographic location. While the 'game' appears relatively simple currently, it will be interesting to see how this can evolve. Into 3-d worlds through which you move as in real-time, affected by real weather and location? Interaction with other BSP users?

ESRI's arcGIS Explorer was fairly highly anticipated by the world. Not only is it a much needed rival to the google-earth's and world-wind's of today - but also an interesting change in direction for ESRI. Some of the functionality already present is really nice, with fairly intuitive interface that ESRI users will be familiar with. James Fee in his spatially adjusted blog, offers extensive review of the new product, together with the news that there are some new nice globes available for the newly releasedarcGIS-online.

I'll do more of a review of arcExplorer when I manage to use it a bit more. Haven't done much with it just now besides look at the base datasets. Currently it feels very similiar to GoogleEarth - though much much slower(almost certainly due to me using their dataservers, not locally kept copies).

I'm rather interested to see what developer tools will be made available, and what other data formats it is likely to support - outside of the esri standards.