On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <<a href="mailto:bmschwar@fas.harvard.edu">bmschwar@fas.harvard.edu</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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Wade Brainerd wrote:<br>
| Too bad the new Google Earth API is much too high level for these purposes,<br>
| it would be great if Google would open up the data.<br>
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Check out <a href="http://openaerialmap.org" target="_blank">openaerialmap.org</a><br>
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It's fantastic.</blockquote><div><br>That is pretty cool - though the data is a bit lower resolution than Google's, and it's pretty easy to reverse engineer Google Maps itself. A friend of mine wrote a desktop application that scrapes images from Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Live Maps into a database for offline use.<br>
<br>The real data I'm interested though is all the annotations that appear in Google Earth, like the links to Wikipedia articles and pictures on Pictorama (or whatever it's called). A quick check reveals that a lot of that data is publicly available too though, as KML layers or in other formats.<br>
<br>So it should be possible to create an school server based or fully online user editable mapping solution for XO, given the data that is available for free. And the Map activity is a good start, it just needs some more development.<br>
<br>Best,<br>Wade<br><br></div></div>