Erik Wilde was pointing out the disparities between Google Maps and Google Ditu, or their Chinese version of maps. However, Google Ditu doesn’t have satellite imagery.

There are several easy ways to fix this. The first was to look at the Ditu tiles, and confirm they are the same as Google’s nominal tiling scheme. Which means you can add the China Street tiles as a simple GTileLayerOverlay with Google Maps standard satellite view underneath. This was incredibly easy with Mapstraction and I put up a demo here.

For bonus points I even added a Mapufacture syndicated feed of Erik’s venues for LocWeb2008 and nearby Wikipedia articles from Geonames.

The other way

The terms of how mixing Google’s various tiles together isn’t clear. So the other way to address his issue is to use the freely available data.

Namely, OpenStreetMap for roads, OpenAerialMap or other remote imagery, and run in OpenLayers. Here is the same map done with open data and open source. The resolution or completeness isn’t there yet, but you can see where it’s going and the ability to be use the information as you want is very appealing.

Tomorrow I fly out to Victoria, British Columbia for next week’s FOSS4G conference (Free and Open-Source Software for Geoinformatics).

On Tuesday I’m giving a lightning talk, “Beyond GPS - Neogeography Data Collection”. I’ll give a quick overview of what people are now starting to map with for aerial imaging, environmental monitoring, traffic, mileage, and more. The conference looks really great - particularly because it’s covering the future of a number of subjects I’m interested and participating in such as APP, REST, GeoRSS, KML, and more.

I’m going early because over the weekend we’re having a OpenStreetMap Victoria Mapping Party. This will be my first OSM Mapping Party - but I’ve heard great things about them, and always lots of Pub time after the good workout.

The map below is the OpenStreetMap coverage of Victoria. I’m embedding it using GeoPress and Mapstraction (end plug). If you read this post before Sunday, September 23, 2007 you’ll see a several holes in the coverage of roads. Hopefully, after this Sunday you’ll see nearly complete coverage.

And if you’re in the area of Victoria (either side of the border) this weekend or Monday, then definitely stop in with or without a GPS receiver to join in on the fun.

I’m busy ramping up a number of projects for Where2.0, but in the meantime there have been some incredibly cool new projects that have shown up on my radar just this morning and wanted to point so others could play with them.

First is Poly9’s FreeEarth. It is a 3D globe viewer that embeds in your browser and is surprisingly fast and easy to use. They also say they’ll be releasing a Javascript API for it. Who needs GoogleEarth in the browser now? You can do your KML, GeoRSS, or other visualization right in the browser. And definitely check out the mixed 2D/3D view that lets you slide a map to control the globe.

Another neat project that was actually released in April, but I just saw today, is ShapeWiki. It was made by Andre Lewis, who co-wrote the Google Maps Applications with Rails… book (review coming shortly). It’s a very nice little application for drawing shape outlines and retrieving the information in generic XML, JSON, or GoogleMaps Javascript.

However, ShapeWiki doesn’t support GeoRSS output (or any RSS) of new Shapes - so everyone drop Andre a lineand let him know this would be a useful feature!

Both projects illustrate how Geo-tools are becoming both easy to use and powerful. I can’t wait to see more of this stuff at Where2.0 (or Where2.2?) and WhereCamp!

Why is it that most major universities maps are still relegated to the old scanned paper copy? Check out the beauty that is University of Michigan’s Campus map. It’s amazing that a major university still uses GIF images for their campus maps.

Now, they know what mapping is, check out their cool transit services. There is even a 3D Atlas of Ann Arbor in Google Earth.

It’s not hard to make this into a more usable dynamic map. I used the MetaCarta’s Map Rectifier to take the campus map image, rectify it using several control points (intersections and circles work great for this) and created a slippy campus map.

You can play with the actual Campus Map here on MapSomething. The next steps would be searchable campus directory, click on buildings to get info on rooms, open times, phone numbers, a way to upload your schedule and have it plan out your route, etc.

Maybe I should send this on over to the School of Information or the Community Information Corps

Henri Bergius has the info on how to run OpenStreetMap on for mapping on your Nokia N800. In fact, it’s incredibly simple. Using MaemoMapper, just add http://tile.openstreetmap.org/%0d/%d/%d.png. to your Map repositories.

This is nice in a couple of ways. First, MaemoMapper, and the underlying Maemo, are open-source applications. So it’s nice to use open geodata. Second, using and caching Googlemap/Yahoo/et al. tiles is probably a violation of their Terms of Service, especially when you use them for realtime navigation. By using OpenStreetMap as the default mapping tile provider, MaemoMapper now provides a base functionality that is free for stringy ToS that could get it into trouble and question its existence.