Mark de Blois Blog » Google Earth

Visualising your holiday trip

Mark — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 23:29:22 +0000

Haven’t we all had to look at hundreds of someone’s holiday photo’s before where you just wish they had slimmed down the selection, done some creative layout or simply just done something cool with them? With all the free tools that are out there on the web there really is no excuse these days not to have some fun holiday photo’s and or video. In 2005 my wife and I and our two little children visited South Africa/Mozambique for business/pleasure. We took lots of pictures, videos and I also recorded some tracks using my Garmin iQue 3600 gadget.

As I had a quiet evening ahead of me I decided I wanted to export my tracks to kmz format for overlay in Google Earth and/or Google Maps. With this file I wanted to add placemarks including links to video highlights. Is that too much to ask for one evening? Not really…

First of all I downloaded my tracks from the GPS through my USB cable using the wonderful Garmin MapSource program. After having selected the tracks I wanted to include I exported them as a gpx file, the open GPS eXchange Format.

Newer versions of Google Earth support direct loading of gpx files but they did not work well in my case. So I used the free GPS Visualizer tool which does a wonderful job of turning my gpx file into a kmz file including nice colouring of the different track content.

All that remained was adding the placemarks in Google Earth which we visited. For some I embedded the YouTube code to the Placemark Description folder as neatly outlined in the Google Earth Outreach tutorial. Had to upgrade to Google Earth 4.2.0198.2451 (beta) before my videos showed up. And voila! Mission accomplished!

Okay, I did already have raw video material sitting around but exporting small videos in mpeg format and uploading them was remarkably easy. Within a few minutes they were directly linkable too (though not immediately indexed yet of course).

Not bad for an evening home, another thing to tick off my hobby to do list. All I have to do now is add some more video/photo content

Download result Google Earth file

If you are using Internet Explorer you might have to change the extension of the Google Earth file from .zip to .kmz to be able to open it directly in Google Earth. Still have to make some changes to my server so that IE users don’t have to go through this hassle. Alternatively you can download Firefox web browser.

WMS services and Google Earth

Mark — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 22:20:21 +0000

Though quite hidden, it is actually possible to add WMS services through the interface of the latest version of Google Earth. I have previously been hacking WMS requests into kml files but didn’t realize there is an easier way. For those not familiar with WMS, it stands for Web Map Service and is a standard setup by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Effectively it is an open standard through which web mapping applications such as MapServer generate snapshots of GIS data. Google Earth has supported for some time now overlaying these images based on the WGS84 map datum but now also through the interface.

In order to add a WMS service:

Click on the menu item Add and choose Image Overlay
Click on the tab Refresh and choose WMS Parameters
Pick your favorite WMS server in the combo box at the top or add your own using Add

In the example here I have added Maplecroft’s Tuberculosis risk index, part of the WMS services I am setting up at Maplecroft.

Rest of Apostle Paulâ€™s journeys now in Google Earth format

Mark — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:32:02 +0000

Besides apostle Paul’s first missionary journey, you can now view the approximate route of all his journeys in Google Earth format, by clicking on the link below.

Download Google Earth file

Apostle Paul’s journeys in Google Earth format

Mark — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:53:49 +0000

The other day whilst hearing about the apostle Paul’s missionary journeys in church, I was finding it hard to remember all the names of the places where he brought the gospel, let alone where on earth they are! And then a thought came to my mind which hasn’t left me since, why not visualize his missionary journeys in Google Earth? I am sure many people with an interest in the Bible would want to check this out. So I did a quick google for Bible places in order to pinpoint the towns he visited. Fortunately others have spent vast amounts of time (from the looks of it) in pinpointing Biblical places, so ‘all’ I had to do was create a Google Earth path to connect this places in the right order. You need Google Earth Pro (trial) for this.~~I have a ‘beta’ of the first missionary journey available for you to check out here. The rest will follow as soon as I find enough of my precious time .~~

A Graphic Tour of Google’s KML Search

Mark — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:41:49 +0000

Recently Google has announced that it is going to have it’s search robots index the (spatial) content of all kml and kmz files published online. This could have huge consequences for the way in which people make available their spatial data. Directions Magazine have made a nice graphic tour of how Google’s KML Search works. You can check it out here.