Placemark Balloon Enhancement in GE 5.0

Many of you may have noticed that the KML generated from your application does not properly reference any placemark balloon attachments when viewed in Google Earth. This is because those attachments are referenced with a local file path rather than a valid URL that Google Earth is looking for. There used to be a gross work around to get those attached files to display properly which involved web servers and modifications to the KML itself. No More! Google Earth 5.0 added a provision to accept local file paths so now all referenced files in the KML will work regardless of whether or not they are on a web server!

To enable this functionality, download Google Earth 5.0 and then go to Tools --> Options --> General tab and check the box that says “Allow placemark balloons to access local files and personal data.”

I understand that Google Earth is more of a wiz-bang visualization utility than an actual geospatial analysis tool but darn it, people use it! This small modification now offers the KML from 3rd party applications whos users don't always have the ability to place their data web server a chance for tighter integration...

GeoServer and GeoPDF

Earlier today, Dave Gura forwarded me a pretty interesting website that takes full advantage of both GeoServer and the GeoPDF file format.  This website, hosted and maintained by the University of Wisconsin Department of Soil Science and the NRCS, is a great example of how to get a lot of valuable data out to a large audience.  More importantly, because the data is published to the GeoPDF format the end user can download and take with them any or all of the tiles they are interested in working with.  Click here to jump over to this web mapping application.  

There are many ways to publish your spatial data!  I have mentioned before that with TerraGo's suite of tools, you are able to index and publish your data directly on a web server like the NRCS did with the University of Wisconsin. From there you can access it through something like GeoServer or a medium as simple as KML like you see below...

I have grown quite fond of the "KML" method and see great potential as a way for those folks with a lot of data to get it out to those who need it.  I guess the question is, are your users  (who have no clue what GIS, KML, GeoServer, Google Earth, etc.)  going to know what to do with a KML file and the data it references?

Gigapan Systems Beta Release

Gigapan Systems announced today that their beta program is officially underway. For the next 10 weeks, those of you who sign up and get on the beta list will get a discount on the system. Check out this example to see what this technology is capable of. Wow...

Note that you are able to view these panoramas in you local KML viewer (i.e. Google Earth)

UPDATE:

This was too funny not to post...Where is Waldo?

Photogrammetry and KML

Ryan Strynatka over at the Fiducial Mark blog announced today that the latest version of LPS will support a KML export to quickly preview the extents of your block file.


This is the first Photogrammetric application that I have seen to support any kind of KML integration. Pretty cool stuff, Ryan...If you want to view the KML directly in Google Earth, download it from here.

Embedding a 3D Google Map

I was reading through the Geospatial Blog Headlines where I discovered that Google finally released a browser plugin for Google Earth. So, I found a site that makes it extremely easy to embed a 3D map in your blog. Check out TakeitWithMe.com to produce the HTML needed to embed your map. See an excerpt from the GeoPDF Map Gallery below. Remember that you must first install the plugin from Google.


Note that this is extremely easy to do and after the small Google install, I was up and running in a matter of minutes.