Coursework tips

Icons

Here is the full set of icons which Goggle supply.

See Lecture 16 for an example of its use

Locations

Google Earth will display the location of a point in either decimal degrees or degrees minutes seconds - you can select which in the options.

With GoogleMaps, the lat and long appear in the URL of a place - you may have to zoom in and out to get it to appear in this format.

If your data has locations in degrees, minutes and seconds, you can convert to decimal degrees using the formula

decimal-degrees := degrees + minutes / 60 + seconds /3600

You will have to take account of the direction too. N and E are positive, S and W negative.

Lecture and workshop week 15

In this workshop you will be preparing to create a dynamic overlay for GoogleEarth.

The key learning points are

• GoogleEarth is extended with user defined overlays, either static or dynamic
• the XML vocabulary is called kml
  
• a valid kml file needs very few elements to create a minimal file
• the file must have a Mime type of application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml
• there are geocoding services which will translate a place name to its latitude and longitude

Resources

• blog entry on Google Earth
• my wiki entries on Geocoding and Location
• slides
• worksheet
• simple PHP to kml script

Google Earth

A brief message from the module leader:


This term , we will be studying a number of XML 'vocabularies' or languages. One which has received a great deal of attention is kml - keyhole mark-up language. Keyhole Corp was acquired by Google in 2004 and their software is the basis of GoogleEarth (GE). kml is the XML language which defines user additions called 'overlays' to the base digital imagery. A kml file is created when you create placemarks and other features in GE and save them as a file. kml is the plain text format, and kmz is a zip compressed format. These files can then be shared by providing a link on a web site, or adding to a GE community site. Moreover kml files can now be accessed by GoogleMap.

Where location data for a subject of interest is available from another source, kml can be generated dynamically using a server-side script such as PHP or XQuery. This is the aspect which we will be exploring in tutorials.

Resources

• kml tutorial and reference
• GoogleEarth Community
• OgleEarth blog by Stefan Geens
• A GoogleTech Talk
• Using GoogleEarth - blog by John Gardiner, a GE developer (and keen mountain biker)
• KoKae - a GE tutorial from Richard Treves, a geographer at Southhampton University
• kml Schema
• 
  

Local examples

• A generated kml map of entertainment places in Bristol - view in Google Map
  

Week 4 Abstraction layers

This week we move up the abstraction layers to look at conceptual modelling. In particular we look at Entity-Relationship Modelling (ERM) and the use of a case tool QSEE which we will use. Shortly the emphasis will be on using QSEE to create a Relational database, but at present we will use QSEE to record our understanding of the underlying data structures required to support Flickr.

• Powerpoint Slides
• QSEE at CEMS - overview
• advice on creating ERMs

In the tutorial we will be forming groups to undertake the first coursework. These groups will be selected to get a mixing of backgrounds and technical skills.

To get the basic use of QSEE sorted, you will be using this package to diagram the KML folder description from the lecture.

• A Folder has a name and contains zero, one or more PlaceMarks and some Styles
• A Placemark has attributes of :
• A name
• A description
• A position defined by its longitude, latitude and Altitude, each represented by a signed decimal number
• Each Placemark belongs tojust one Folder
  
• A Style defines the appearance of one or more placemarks
• the symbol to show as a jpeg image
• the size,
• the foreground and background colours.
• Each Placemark has a Style

The QSEE package includes some excellent help files and examples and I have supplemented this with some additional notes. We expect that you will use QSEE to document your understanding of the Flickr application before using it in a model-driven mode to create your own version of Flickr.