Festival of Maps KML
I’m spending a couple of days in Chicago and wanted to visit a couple of the Festival of Maps exhibits. However, the only interface, as I mentioned before, is their flash map. Well, I wrote a small script to pull the information from their “printer-friendly” pages and generated this very useful Chicago Festival of Maps KML.
It’s also available via Mapufacture if you want to embed the map in your blog, get the GeoRSS, or mix in with another map you may have for say, other events and sights in Chicago.
I imported the KML file into my GPS receiver – which is pretty cool, and Mapufacture Mobile lets me use my N95 to find nearby locations. The original KML even has the address and phone number as KML elements, although no KML parser I’ve run across makes us of that info… yet. The iPhone Maps application loads ‘most’ of the markers, but doesn’t pull out the phoneNumber elements either.
Unfortunately, neither MGMaps (using OpenStreetMap tiles) nor GoogleMaps Mobile let me pull in KML – MGMaps complains and GoogleMaps Mobile just doesn’t have that bit of functionality. Perhaps they’re both waiting for OGC-KML ‘Mobile Profile’ 
Of course, a Dash would be a really good fit for this KML as well.
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November 29th, 2007 at 2:49 pm (#)
Ah! Wish I’d seen this two weeks ago, when I was in Chicago. The Field museum exhibit was interesting – from the map of Napoleon’s march into (and out of) Russia, to Snow’s map of Cholera deaths in London, to the famous Underground map, some of De Vinci’s map, and others. Super cool for any map lover..
BTW, to add to your list, ZoneTag could take the GeoRSS and allow you to annotate your photos of the different attractions right after capture.