Virtual Campus Website

So, I have set everything up for the seminar website, however I have not constructed much content. I have a few sentences but I need content for:

1) Home Page-has Add Content on it as a note

2) About Us -has our blog names and We Rock! We Love Geography. We think highly of ourselves.

3) Contact Us -has link to class blog

4) Project List- has five projects: i) Green Space, ii) New Science Building Construction, iii) Restaurants, Pub, and Fast Food, iv) Campus Parking, Decks, and the Homeless, and v) Locating Vending Machines and ATMs.

5) Photo Gallery- has link to flickr photos and about 8-12 random pics from upload photos with links (and captions)

I have used a lot of images from the photostream and photos that I have yet to upload. So, now I am writing content but I do not know the full scope of our interests. If you could let me know your objectives so I can put this together. Also, if anyone would like to participate I developed the site in Microsoft Publisher because it is easy to use (I can do it at work) and anyone can learn it quickly because it is nothing more than a bunch of text boxes. Just let me know if you would like to contribute or prefer specific pictures, colors, navigation buttons, etc.

 

Question: If OpenStreetMap Uploads It’s Edits One A Week Then…

Should we not be tracking today and at the very latest tomorrow if openstreetmap only throw it’s edits in once a week?  I may be wrong though will try to find out when they allow edits in their map before class. Thanks

 

HAVE UPLOADED GPS TODAY IN OPEN STREET MAP

Hi all,

Took a few days off this week and wanted to try a continuous uninterrupted track(open space) of about 1.4 miles up on Kennesaw Mountain this morning.  It uploaded successfully but has not displayed as yet in open street map.  Will track some tonight and tomorrow around campus and up load those as well.  Easy GPS is wonderful not a bit of trouble, also I put a program (that Michael recommended) on the front computer in lab entitled “dnrgarmin53setup” this is great for converting your .gpx files into actual shape files that you can bring into ArcGis——very easy to do.

 

Joystick technology in Google Earth

I was looking back at some of the blogs on Planet Geospatial and found a blog about the new joystick technology in google earth, which was posted back in february. I’m just posting it in case no one else new of this…

 

View Google Map project in Google Earth

Here is the Link.

 

US Election 2008 Web Monitor mashup…

The US08 Media Watch provides a comprehensive and continuously updated archive of media coverage on the US Presidential Election 2008. The project analyses the Web sites of the Fortune 1000 (the largest US corporations ranked by revenue), 50 environmental organizations, 1000 popular blogs on political issues, and international media from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Processing these sites yields more than 800,000 documents each week. Automated algorithms identify attention by counting references to a candidate, and measure sentiment by associating these references with positive and negative terms. Keywords, grouped by political party and geographic region, reflect current events associated with the candidates.

Interactive visualizations help understand the complex semantic relationships (information landscape, geographic map, ontology graph and tag cloud; the ‘Help’ function provides a detailed interface description).

 

Google Maps adds videos

Google Maps finally caught up with Google Earth today and added Youtube video support. From the official Google map blog:

I’m excited to report the Google Maps team launched a new feature that showcases embedded YouTube videos in Maps. Geotagged YouTube videos have been available in Google Earth since last year, and we thought that it was only natural to extend this functionality to Google Maps.

This affects some of you who were trying to insert videos in the Google Maps project.

 

What OSM needs re GPS tracks

See here for some info on what OSM needs re GPS. It needs the date stamp and it cannot take waypoints (just tracks).

Your GPX should consist of trackpoints with valid timestamps. The ele(vation) tag is optional and will default to 0. Note if using a Garmin GPS device: Many of these units have the facility to save the track that strips out the timestamps. Saved tracks will fail to be imported to OSM because of this. Instead make sure you upload GPX files created from the active track(s) from the device rather than any tracks you have saved.

There are two things the importer won’t do. First, it won’t take in GPS points without timestamps as they’re to be used to work out speed and so on. The other is that it doesn’t import waypoints and your file consists only of waypoints.

The reason for this is that if you reset many GPS units or download map data to them, then you often get copyrighted data put in the GPX. The most famous example is that if you reset a Garmin GPS unit then it will put the locations of the Garmin offices around the world as waypoints on the unit.

 

GPS Trackmaker….

Here is the homepage of GPS trackmaker.  If you download, be sure to get the free version.

With the free version:

• You can create fast vectorial background maps
• Download and upload Waypoints, Tracklogs and Routes to/from GPS
• More than 260 GPS icons for Waypoints
• Calibrate map images in GIF, JPG, BMP, WMF and EMF
• Many tools to create Tracklogs
• Many other tools to create your own maps

Also, it is very helpful to have a background reference map to view your tracks/routes/waypoints against.  A very nice map of North and Central America can be downloaded here.  Be sure to install GPS Trackmaker first, THEN install the “NorthCentralAm11.exe” file (background map).

 

Final project

These are the guidelines we discussed tonight:

1. Portfolio of materials and data you have collected, including photos, GPS tracks, annotations. Can link to flickr or online material.

2. Descriptive paper with 4 main parts:

I. Goals and Objectives
II. Rationale/Reasons
III. Methods
IV. Results
Hope this helps. Last day of class is April 28.