GIS and Remote Sensing Tools, Tips and more ..

I was checking the route for nearest police station from my office around 3 PM MT using the Chrome. The  Google Map's street looks so funny and floppy. All the street lines and highways lines were wiped out. The interstate has some brown points, if you zoom in them the point looks like half circle. Which has the bug Google Maps or Chrome? Click on images for bigger picture ! (Missing roads)                                                                  (Missing roads on zoom)                                                                          (More zoom in...) (Looks good in  the Firefox though)

Finally on Nov 19 2013, Google shut down Google Maps v2 API, which was depreciated in May 19 2010 but was working continuously Nov 19. I was aware of version depreciation, but I procrastinate to upgrade till last minute because of working on too many other things. While checking my Web map (built on Openlayers, Geoserver and Google Maps as base layers (Google Maps API v2) on Nov 20, I saw two map controls one from Openlayers and other from Google Maps API also noticed that map application was unresponsive. Looking around I found easy steps to fix it without major change in the code-

From a couple of months, I have been involved in Tax certificate address verification project for educational purpose; I have around 8 million parcel address   collected and maintained by different tax collecting agencies in various format for instance COBOL ,CSV, ASCII, Excel , and some are even in pdf for their tax districts.  My task was to find the address from those different files and export them in CSV with corrected standard USPS address format (STREET, CITY, STATE, and ZIP) to make Universal Tax File format for data analysis by removing unwanted data from the address rows.   Initially, I used ZP4 software, it has “ official United States Postal Service data files on a single DVD-ROM that provides a powerful tool for automatically determining the correct mailing address, ZIP + 4 code, and mail carrier route number for any location in the United States”, works fine for few address (about 15%) which has proper USPS standard address format. The real challenge s...

Abstract Analyzing space-time variation is common in Geography. Appropriate geo-spatial visualization enables us to understand data in a precise manner. There have been numerous researches, tools, and methods in pursuit of a better visualization method for geospatial data. Here we present the sets of examples developed by us to show the benefits of the web cartography using Google Earth/Google Maps mashups to display geospatial data. Moreover, we include the practical implication of applications that are useful for visualizing geospatial world.

pyKML   is an open source Python library for generating, parsing, and modifying   KML , the geo-spatial data language used by Google Earth, Google Maps and a number of other GIS platforms. pyKML helps working with large and complex KML documents by leveraging the use of basic programming constructs (looping, branching, etc.). In this regard pyKML is similar to   libkml , Google’s open source C++ library, but takes advantage of the highly readable syntax of the   Python   programming language and the processing capabilities of the popular   lxml   Python library. pyKML v0.1.0 documentation :  http://packages.python.org/pykml/ Source: Google Geo Developers Blog

“ This book is an attempt to share the knowledge I've gained from the experts at Google. When I joined it, the KML team consisted of two engineers: Bent Hagemark and Michael Ashbridge ("Mash"). Bent and Mash's mission was to corral the existing KML into a formal XML schema, to create compelling examples that would represent good coding style, and to shepherd the language to its new and deserved status as an international standard. I was to create a website for KML and expand the existing documentation. I managed to complete that task, but it always felt as though I'd exposed only the tip of the iceberg. Well, here's The Iceberg.”          – Author "KML Handbook :Geographic Visualization for the Web" is primarily targeted for people who are curious about how to create customized presentations for an Earth browser such as Google Earth but have little or no experience with computer programming. It has step by step guidelines to create...

The Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence at South Dakota State University developed a web based West Nile virus (WNV) mapping application using Geosever, Openlayers, PostGIS,GeoWebCache, Jquery, Google visualization APIs, and, other open source technologies. This application allows users to pan, and zoom to visualize historical WNV patterns while using a slider bar to navigate through time. Users can click on counties to see -county level time-series graphs, case counts, and total population. The application also supports changing choropleth transparencies, choropleth classifications, and map backgrounds. Methods: A. OpenGeo tools: i.     Open layers ii.    Geoserver iii.   WebGeoCache iv.   PostGIS B. Google APIs i.       Google Maps API ii.      Google Charting API C.      HTML5 These are frequently refereed to as HTML5 technologies. Javascript HTML Canvas ...

Creating a kmz image overlay  1. Make sure the dataset you are working with has a geographic coordinate system (unprojected) with WGS84 as the datum. If not, you will need to reproject your data. If the coordinate system of your datasets is defined you can change the projection “on-the-fly”. To reproject on-the-fly, go to Layers then Click Properties and specify geographic with WGS84 datum as the coordinate system. However, I recommend reprojecting the actual GIS datasets (shapefiles, grids, etc.) because project-on-the-fly is not always very precise, particularly when dealing with datum transformations. 2. Switch to the layout view. Select a layout that matches the dimensions of your map as closely as possible. To keep the file sizes of your images small, try to leave as little empty space around the edges as possible. Right-click on the layout and select Page and Print Setup to change the layout size. 3. Right-click on the map and select Properties. Go to the Size and Posit...