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!
Spring finally arrived in Vienna, sun is shining and I could reactivate my bicycle. Since I go quite often by bike during summer months I decided to start a kind of a “bike project” this year. My bike will serve for another purpose too than just bringing me from point A to B, it’ll track and share the way in-between.
Recent discussions about INSPIRE and free geodata directed my attention to the OpenStreetMap initiative. In my opinion it’s a great idea and I decided to participate. But first a few GPS street tracks for sharing are needed. So I equipped my bike with a Garmin GPSmap 60C. Well, to be honest, it’s rather carrying the device with me than owning a GPS enabled bicycle now. Btw, can somebody recommend a clamp or another good method to mount the Garmin GPSmap 60C on a bike?
The plan is to track every meter I’m going by bicycle during this summer. It allows me to add some more street information of Vienna to OpenStreetMap and I get an interesting picture of how often and which bike routes and streets I’ve chosen. This may sound pretty geeky, actually it is, but I kind of enjoy toying around with geo technology.
The continuously growing picture of my bike trails you can observe online, in my so called bike_trails map.
If you’re interested, this script let me easily display my GPX formated GPS tracks as overlay in a customized Google Map (mashup, to name a buzzword and make some search robots happy). As you can see, the GPS tracks don’t exactly match the Google Map behind. I’m not quite sure which one of both is more inaccurate, Google or GPS…
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 #2
Update #3
Update #4:
Improved photo search.