Thursday, October 19, 2006

Spain's topographic maps

From the beginning of Wikiloc there's been external map servers available for the region of Catalonia (North-East of Spain) thanks to the initiative of the Institut Cartografic de Catalunya to open their web map services and geodata to the public. Later on I added the Terraserver-USA Web Map Services (topo/imagery) for the United States.

Today I'm glad to announce that there's already coverage for the whole spanish territory thanks to the IDEE project of the Instituto Geografico Nacional. Their web map services have been around for quite a long time, it was my fault (lack of time!) not to made them available within Wikiloc until now.

I'm glad that the public sector in Spain is opening access to geodata to citizens, freely, interoperable, useful. Good.

I'll do my best to add all the web map services that many of you have been requesting! Stay tuned! :-)

As usual, if you want to activate additional base imagery and maps for the region you're viewing, you can do it by clicking on the "More Maps" drop down list:

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

US topographic maps

I've just added Terraserver USA Web Map Service as a provider of Topographic maps for the US in Wikiloc. Some screen captures follow but I suggest you to check it out live by yourself in Wikiloc by clicking on the links below:

Heiroglyphic Trail (Phoenix):


Rowing around Lake Union (Seattle):


Once in Wikiloc you can access these additional map servers by clicking on the "More Maps" button:

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

View your GPS data on multiple base maps

Wikiloc lets you visualize tracks and waypoints on multiple base maps, thanks to a cool feature of the Google Maps API that allows to overlay third party's map data and imagery. At the moment there's coverage for almost the whole US (using TerraserverUSA Web Map Service) and Catalunya (Spain) using the multiple WMS servers provided by ICC (Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya). I've already received requests to add new WMS to Wikiloc and I hope they'll be available in the next few days.

Some samples:

The following images taken from Wikiloc show views of the same GPS track over different base imagery and maps. From left to right, top to bottom: Google's Map view, Satellite view (the zone doesn't have much detail by now), ICC's 1:50000 WMS topographic map and the last two pics show the detail that can be reached using the ICC's 1:5000 accurate orthoimagery (it's been taken from a plane instead of a satellite):



And another sample: the following snapshots show some waypoints taken in the way up to Mount Marathon (Seward, Alaska). In this geographic location we can use USGS imagery:



I'm personally glad of this feature since viewing my GPS tracks over multiple base maps was one of the motivations that drove me to develop Wikiloc. By then I couldn't imagine that I'll be viewing them -easily- in 3D as well. :) Hope it'll be useful for you too!