Hi, some countries have nice online maps and airophotos, the only problem is that they are always in different coordinate systems, so that you usually need coordinate transformation. I have the web addresses for some servers in Germany (topo maps, airophoto with 2m resolution), partially Austria, GB, Italia, US, Canada. Greetings Wolfgang John Pybus schrieb:
Wookey wrote:
It may be cool, but it's not much of an aspiration whilst google earth remains proprietary software. I'm sticking to Free viewers we have some control over.
One option is to target NASA whirlwind instead of/in addition to GoogleEarth. WW is open source and uses free NASA data. The current 1.3.x versions use .net & DirectX, so are windows only. The upcoming 1.5 release is a reimplementation in java and JOGL which will be cross platform. It has currently entered a limited distribution alpha test; a public beta is due in the next few weeks.
Similar problem with the map data. It's not ours, we can't do what we want with it (like publish the results in a journal). We can't use it offline, and so on (correct me if I am wrong on any of this). So it's (very) nice, but also highly limited.
There are some sources of free map data (at least in the UK). www.openstreetmap.org has increasing coverage, and scans of the out of copyright 1940s/50s New Popular edition OS maps are available at www.npemap.org.uk under a Creative Commons non-commercial license.
In fact npemap.org.uk are using the maps to create an unencumbered geolocated DB of UK postcodes. Which is a good thing generally, so I recommend going along browsing to a place you know the postcode for and adding a bit more data. See http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1936557,00.html
John _______________________________________________ Therion mailing list Therion@speleo.sk http://www.speleo.sk/mailman/listinfo/therion