April catch up - Glencoe, FutureTV and news.

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

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?

Geovisualisation essay

A post in the GE blog on some Second Life and Virtual World stuff..

Also CBBC World

Bits and pieces + dissertation proposal

First of all - doing a course on geo-informatics and one of my coursemates pointed to an excellent flash movie explaining the many dimensions of our universe. It appears roughly adapted from the text we were prescribed by Abbott (1884).

Second, my dissertation proposal is due in fairly shortly, and I've decided to proceed along the lines of converting an online gazzeteer into XML data format, and provide some kind of interface and front ends for this data. This could be in the format of the older traditional website which could be 'cleaned' up, but perhaps more interestingly by providing mechanisms to some of the other means we have for disseminating information. Google Earth, and it's virtual globe peers, seem a good place to start, so one of the interesting projects would be to write some kind of XML to KML conversion.

On the blog front, several blogs reported and commented on the news of digital globe buying globe explorer. Which is interesting as the former is a major provider of data to google, while the other provides to Microsoft. Interesting..

Oh and the earth is square blog found this fantastic little terrain modelling, play gadget! brilliant!

- visualising textual data
- making gazetteer co-ordinate data multi-platform (kml, gml?)