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August 23 Mashing Up MapsOne of the main services that often gets used in Web Services is mapping services. There are several reasons for this: this is a standout technology, there is no obvious way for 99.999% of organisations to take this quality of service in house, and also these services have great, powerful APIs.
There are two obvious services to choose from, Google Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth.
I decided, as a demo of the sort of things these services could do, I'd try and emulate the University of Edinburgh's own central area campus map (http://www.ed.ac.uk/maps/central-area/) to see if I could, quickly, make something that emulates the features there, and maybe extend to it. Looking at it, I'd obvious want to keep the way of identify buildings when you click on them, but noticed a couple areas where it could be improved: the silhoutted view doesn't give an idea of the lay of the land, and the map is contrained in size. I especially noticed the latter with the notice on one street "To Pollock Halls". Pollock is one of the main residentual campuses, especially for 1st years. Yet they are the very people who need a step-by-step direction from their campus to the central area, especially in those first couple of weeks. I wonder if a web service could improve that. So I gave Virtual Earth a try (I chose VE over Google Maps simply because VE has better aerial photography of Edinburgh!)
This is what I came up with in less than 45 minutes (actually 1 hour 15 minutes, but half an hour was spent furiously trying to figure out longitude and latitude values...).
I was hoping to add screenshots here, but Windows Live Writer completely refuses to upload my pictures. So, I'll try and upload them with a different method in next post. What I managed to do was emulate the central area campus map, put buttons on that allow the user to identify buildings, and also, to add a feature, showed how easy (a 1-liner!) it is to generate a directions map from Pollock Halls to the central area. All in a Web 2.0 application that can be scrolled around and looked at in different zooms and allows a different perspective to be put on the map.
As I say, this was only the briefly less-than-an-hour playing with Virtual Earth.
The code is, in my own verbose spacing way, a merely 64 lines: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> function LibraryButton_onclick() function GrSqTh_onclick() function PLKH_Directions_onclick() </script>
It does throw a few XHTML validation errors, but for this demo, I am not going to bother with those! All the code is based on code available in the SDK for Virtual Earth (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=121CDAE7-EA23-4634-B815-4300EB98EE88&displaylang=en) and this is barely scratching the surface...
If you have any questions about the above, feel free to email me at the usual mark(dot)sammons(at)ed(dot)ac(dot)uk address. Comments (4)
Mark Sammons
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