I’ve just got back from Google’s developer day at the Brewery in Chiswell Street, London. The sessions I was most interested in were the mapping applications. Ed Parsons, formerly of the Ordnance Survey gave an overview of what they are up to and highlighted the usefulness of KML and geoRSS files for indexing site content.
I’ve built these into the very heart of the new CCI website that is currently in test phase. Some of the stuff I have used only got released in the last few weeks and I’m looking forward to trying to build mapplet ideas based around geographical data from our databases. The new features that they have added to their mapping interface can be seen at either http://maps.google.co.uk/preview or http://maps.google.com/preview (this one is better as it allows you to view street level imagery and traffic data on the maps interface.
Andrew Eland’s presentation focussed on the construction of mapplets and the extension of the Google Maps API. I’ll try and take advantage of as much as we can for the Scheme’s website. More exciting is the world of KML as highlighted by Paul Burch. There’s all sorts of possibilities there for the Museum. Imagine visualising on a map where all 7 million objects in the Museum came from, doing advanced Sketch up models of monuments that we have parts of in the collection. We could really engage with the web community!
Other things that were talked about were of less interest for me, but probably of great interest to other developers (I still maintain that I only dabble in computers!) such as Google Gears for offline working. The details of this can be found at http://code.google.com. For pictures of the events and streaming video from the day, you can visit the dedicated website at http://code.google.com/events/developerday/index.html
OpenCalais helped to tag this with: Andrew Eland • api • Chiswell Street • Google • London • Paul Burch • streaming video • web community
Possibly related posts: Google maps KML import now available. • Maps…. • Database upgrade work to commence •
