Template talk:GIS view

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I will just assume that Google Earth is going to be dominant and work with it. I am aware of the Geolinks-US-buildingscale template, but for some purposes, the free version Google Earth is a higher-end application, and altitude also has more relevancy.

Apologies that I have to reference a non-Wikipedia server to convert GIS with correct MIME type. For the moment, it is the only way I can make for one-click integration between Wikipedia and Google Earth. The problem is that Google Earth is a desktop application, not a web service. It needs a MIME type to drive it and that can be provided by a CGI script. The real trick is the desktop integration that allows for one-click viewing. If Google Earth people are reading this, please forward to Mark Law or whomever is likely to DO something about this in the next few beta releases and to just stick a copy of this CGI on one of Google's web servers.

I posted something to GE/Keyhole about this:

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/57292

So the questions, besides Google implementing something like my CGI on one of their servers is:

1. Will Google Earth become a plugin or something? 2. Is there some other way to get, one click, from a URL with the GIS data embedded, to seeing it in Google Earth?

Elevation is in meters, but GE UI shows it in feet. Multiply feet by 0.3048 to get meters. I would appreciate feedback on what the GIS data in Wikipedia should be. For now, it is meters. For the Lat/Long, I am using decimal notation. That minute/second stuff is just too foofy for me. The Placemark XML keywords are nice, but I find that the icon used in the UI is intrusive. When you type in the data directly, you get a crosshair, but when you use the CGI with only a LookAt, there is no crosshair or anything. I will settle for that for now.

I wonder if I should put tilt and heading in?

Are there any operational standards for new a new "scheme" for GIS in a URL? The problem is that there are only a few schemes defined: http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes

I noticed that MS has already responded with Virtual Earth. You can be sure that they will just use ActiveX or some other blah to get one-click going: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/07/25/HNmsvirtualearth_1.html

The MIME types are:

• application/earthviewer eta
• application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml kml
• application/vnd.google-earth.kmz kmz

I am using the *.kml format for the echo. If one of the other MIME types is better, please let me know.

Right now, I am using this Perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my($my_file);

use CGI ':standard';
my $my_lat = param('lat');
my $my_long = param('long');
my $my_elev = param('elev');

# Note: Google Earth works better if you pull up 100 meters
$my_elev = $my_elev + 100;

print "content-type: application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml\n\n";

print "\<kml xmlns=\"http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0\"\> \<Folder\> \<name\> You
r Request \</name\> \<visibility\> 1 \</visibility\> \<LookAt\> \n \<longitude\>
 $my_long \</longitude\> \n \<latitude\> $my_lat \</latitude\> \n \<range\> $my_
elev \</range\>\n \<tilt\>0\</tilt\>\<heading\>0\</heading\>\n \</LookAt\> \</Fo
lder\> \</kml\>\n";
exit 0;

Amorrow 00:25, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] This has failed to catch on

We should change the existing ones to Geolinks-US-buildingscale template