Google Earth and Google Maps
Our classmate Hung and I did a presentation that featured Geo Web technologies and we concentrated our presentation on the mapping technology delivered by Google. Hung did his part on the G. Earth and I will focus here on G. Maps, as I did it on my part of our presentation. The main difference that I would like to mention again is the fact that G. Earth has to be downloaded to one particular computer to work – almost like a regular desktop application. G. Maps, does not need to be downloaded to work. In that sense, G. maps is more of a Web 2.0 application than G. Earth, in my opinion. One can use almost any computer connected to the internet to access G. Maps. If you have a Google account, you can even save your maps and other features, so you can access your saved maps almost anywhere.
I demonstrated in the presentation how to search for different locations, and a couple of new features that G. Maps has, for instance the ability to find Wikipedia documents that are linked to specific places on the map. I showed the map of Boston and how you could see history and detailed descriptions of places in that city by clicking on different documents attached to the map. One thing that I didn’t have to time to show in class was the feature called Street View. It is a great feature to see how the view looks like if you were right at that location. One can even rotate this view around 360 degrees, in many locations displayed on Google Maps; I should point out that not all locations have that feature but several major (and medium size) cities do have this feature available.
Link to my presentation - pdf document - http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~hcorde01/itec830/pres-geo7b.pdf
Our classmate Hung and I did a presentation that featured Geo Web technologies and we concentrated our presentation on the mapping technology delivered by Google. Hung did his part on the G. Earth and I will focus here on G. Maps, as I did it on my part of our presentation. The main difference that I would like to mention again is the fact that G. Earth has to be downloaded to one particular computer to work – almost like a regular desktop application. G. Maps, does not need to be downloaded to work. In that sense, G. maps is more of a Web 2.0 application than G. Earth, in my opinion. One can use almost any computer connected to the internet to access G. Maps. If you have a Google account, you can even save your maps and other features, so you can access your saved maps almost anywhere.
I demonstrated in the presentation how to search for different locations, and a couple of new features that G. Maps has, for instance the ability to find Wikipedia documents that are linked to specific places on the map. I showed the map of Boston and how you could see history and detailed descriptions of places in that city by clicking on different documents attached to the map. One thing that I didn’t have to time to show in class was the feature called Street View. It is a great feature to see how the view looks like if you were right at that location. One can even rotate this view around 360 degrees, in many locations displayed on Google Maps; I should point out that not all locations have that feature but several major (and medium size) cities do have this feature available.
Link to my presentation - pdf document - http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~hcorde01/itec830/pres-geo7b.pdf
