Now that’s what I call a precise weather map!
German perfectionism at its best.
a personal website slash blog
Tag Archive for 'Map'
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On Tagzania you find all FIFA Worldcup 2006 stadiums in Germany mapped and tagged, match schedules included.
GfK Macon offers a static map showing all places where the teams will stay during the tournament. So if you would like to meet your favorite team or player you know where to go.
Anyone who would like to place a bet?
My tips:
- The next FIFA World Champion won’t be a European team.
- My tip for the overall winner and the next FIFA World Champion is Argentina. Don’t know, it’s just a feeling…
I reserve the right to change those tips in case Rooney shows up and Owen leaves his depression at the border to Germany.
Today I slightly modified my Vienna Underground Map. Due to the big European Google Maps update of last week it became clear that some station-points were not where they should be. So I adjusted some of them. The points still represent only the station-”center”, not the exits. There are of course a lot more underground exits than points. Another thing a few people asked: the lines do not show the real underground tracks, it’s just a schema. The lines are direct connections between the stations, aimed to illustrate underground lines.
As default background map I’m now using the normal map, not the satellite imagery anymore. I think it fits better as base-map for this kind of overlay content. Of course the user still has the option to switch between all three types of background maps – normal, satellite or hybrid map. The base-map change made me modify some styles in order to ensure readability.
In my logfiles I noticed incoming links from some tourist sites. Apparently this little map provides some useful information for potential visitors and tourists. I have no plans to develop a full featured public transport information system, but in order to give some more information about subway, tram or bus in Vienna I added a link to the public transport timetable information and routing system.
Thanks to all people at flickr who let me know about new viennese underground photos!
During last months I started using a GPS device, a Garmin GPSmap 60C, more frequently. I started tracking my bike routes through Vienna (see my bike_trails), loaded them into ArcGIS and began to compile a customised Garmin map, a bike routes map for Vienna in particular.
Organising this years holiday trip to California I thought I’ll try to load some digital city maps of my destinations onto the GPS. I only needed maps for a few cities such as San Francisco, San José and surroundings. Surfing through the Garmin website I found out that I can either buy whole North America or nothing, the same in Europe. Talking to the shop assistant where I bought my Garmin brought the same result. So I should spend 200-300 EUR just to replace two or three city maps? Seems quite pricey, a city map I get for about 10 EUR and I doubt the benefit of the GPS map is 20-30 times higher compared to a conventional paper map. Sure, I’m getting whole North America or Europe for that price, but I only need 2 cities out of the bundle. Why shouldn’t it be possible? It’s all stored in databases, just select the area and make it available. I wouldn’t buy all paper maps of North American or European cities at once either.
Not willing to buy whole continents (btw why does Garmin split it’s products into continents while they could force customers to buy all cities of the whole world at once) I started a little research about other data sources and found MapCenter, a great place for user created free Garmin GPS maps. The area around San Francisco and San José is covered quite well and I downloaded a few street maps there.
After the big European Google Maps update last week, I came yesterday across this headline: Google Maps on your mobile phone (via heise, german). This mobile application comes very close to what I was looking for, to have a searchable and easy to use city map in my pocket. Even better on my mobile phone because I don’t have to bother about carrying the GPS device with me. I guess mainly because of privacy concerns Google doesn’t locate you automatically, even if it would be possible in some urbanized areas. Frankly, I would like to have the option to enable this feature, to be located while connecting to Google Maps Mobile and have the map centered on my current location immediately.
However, I think I’ll get some paper city maps too. They still have some major advantages over digital maps, even without a search bar: drawing and marking individual spots, no loading, no bothering with zoom and pan…
Since Google Maps API Version 2 is now beta, I updated my little Vienna Underground Map to use the GMap2 class and added station names as tooltips in the map.
In contrast to several media scare stories about avain flu you’ll find here a well edited H5N1 distribution map by Declan Butler. A great example of how to use Google Earth for information dissemination.
As spring took its time to arrive in Austria and the unfriendly weather forced me to stay at home I started playing around with the Google Maps API again. A few weeks ago I saw those nice underground maps for London and Madrid and thought that I’ll create one for Vienna.
All the necessary information like positions, line numbers, station names, etc. are stored within a XML file which I can access by JavaScript and overlay it to my Google Map. Of course it would be possible to pull all that information out of a database too, but for about 40 stations it would rather be an overkill than useful. I thought about extending the map by tramway and bus stations. Then a database solution would make sense as you’ll probably get a few thousand stations to manage.
Additionally I put links to Flickr to the stations, all stored in my XML file. If I found a station relevant photo on Flickr it’ll display within the information bubble directly on the map. A link to Flickr search gives you the photos which contain “Vienna station name“. If you have a photo on Flickr of a certain viennese underground station, just add the appropriate station name and Vienna to its tags, title or description and it’ll be found by this search string. To narrow the results it would be great to have an underground station specific tag like subway or underground.
I think it’s a nice feature. If you don’t know the place you get an image what it looks like, or what the station looks like. Underground photos can be really interesting, frankly, I somehow like them. Once position information is an EXIF tag by default all this search-by-name will be redundant and some strange robots will automatically map your holiday photos. But till then, human beings have to apply names to places.
The points (“U”) in the map only represent the “center” of the station. I didn’t map every single exit. That would be something for my ToDo list.
All in all it isn’t a big deal but I think it’s nice example for testing and learning webmapping APIs. Once ArcWeb SVG Viewer offers some detailed data for my region I’ll probably apply this map for their API. Actually I’m pretty looking forward to try their JavaScript/SVG thing.
Update #1:
More details about Vienna’s underground network you find at UrbanRail.net.
Update #4:
Improved photo search.
Fascinating: Map of the Earth with countries sized by population (via BB). I saw it already this summer in the maps exhibition at ICC 2005. Power and distribution are the words that came to my mind.
