Shorts: Shape2Earth, Navman GPS+Photo

Thursday, March 30, 2006 (16:47 UTC)

Tim Beerman has been blogging the impending release of his Shape2Earth plugin for MapWindow, an open source GIS viewer. Here is some eyecandy of converted Shapefiles made with Shape2Earth, which is currently being beta-tested. Here is a walkthrough of a typical process for converting Shapefiles into Google Earth.

Now that Google Earth has high-resolution data for Germany, it's worth building 3D structures on top of it. Behold Bamberg Cathedral, on Google Earth Hacks.

Google Earth Blog notes some further undocumented improvements to the dataset for Google Earth, as listed by an eagle-eyed Google Earth Community member. Checking Kampala (Uganda), it is now indeed in high resolution (which it wasn't when last I visited just over a week ago) and — with less certainty now — large strips in South Africa have gone high resolution, which I don't believe were there before. It is great to see the developing world, including India, being given a higher priority in the data updates.

GPSLodge reports on the new Navman GPS devices out today, whose main distinguishing feature is a 1.3 megapixel camera. Nothing to write home about, camera-wise, but surely this "gadget mashup" is the leading edge of a trend? It should result in far more georeferenced content showing up on Flickr et. al. sometime soon. (On the other extreme end of the georeferenced photo product spectrum is the new Nikon D200, which can optionally connect to a GPS device via a cable to have it fed geodata into a photograph's metadata.)

Comments