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Google Maps

There are hills in them there maps…

Without much fuss we added an extra button to Google Maps todays and brought relief to cartography fans everywhere… sorry that is the worst pun I could come up with.

The terrain view is offers another perspective of our world and for some users, like those interested in outdoors recreation for example, is really vital.Terrain

Written and submitted from the Malmaison Hotel, Birmingham, using it’s free wired broadband network.

7 replies on “There are hills in them there maps…”

Where are you getting the DEM data? I assume the Tele Atlas copyright refers to the street map only?

Also, I wish that the Map, Satellite, and Terrain buttons were additive toggles like the Street View and Traffic buttons. That way you wouldn’t need the Hybrid checkbox under Satellite: I could just toggle on Map and Satellite to get both. I think seeing the terrain blended with the satellite imagery would be fun, too.

I think that Google has a pretty decent source of DEM in one of their other products 🙂

This is really nice looking; moreso than straight painted relief would be. The land cover fusion appears to be highly generalized though, and from a different source than the street maps.

I really do like the terrain coloring in this dataset, Ed. I’ve had several discussion, attempting to urge others to take a long look at shading with ‘European sensibilities’, as it looks like Google’s done elegantly in this case. It’s a rather nice representation that I think will be useful to all. It’s very easy on the eyes, and highly readable, and highly meaningful.

Hopefully, the streets and city names are not baked into the tiles, but a separate layer. Similar to the way the hybrid layer is constructed as an array of two actual layers.

Haven’t had a chance to look into it. If not, too bad. The tiles definitely look better then the srtm-in-ulm tiles. But i need annotation free tiles for my visualization purposes.

I realise that this is slightly off topic, but can I talk to you about ‘My/Our Maps’?

Google’s recent introduction of ‘Our Maps’ is a really powerful development on the original ‘My Maps’ concept, but I am hitting some new limits. Here is my wish list for Xmas 🙂

I am entering details for proposed transport schemes in the UK and it would be good to create clusters/ sets/ groups of maps with a shared characteristic (for example car related/ cycle related/ rail related).

By way of example I have created a maps that relate to the A14, to Stowmarket, to Huntingdon and to cyclists and to the rail network in various combinations.

It would also be good to be able to explicit create links to other resources in a structured way rather than just as freeform embedded text, for example to the Highways Agency scheme announcement or to activist sites.

I would like to be able to search for maps of interest within a bounding box or territory, ie ‘roads’ in ‘Suffolk’.

There are clear parallels with the community requirements for photo sharing and video sharing sites and it would be great to have all the tools in the tool box.

You can see my maps here:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/user?uid=104934064451037374031&hl=en&gl=uk

Thanks….

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