Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Geographic Web Layer FAQ

As promised, I posted a new FAQ that describes how you can use and publish to the Geographic Web layer of Google Earth. This document describes how to make Wikipedia articles appear in this layer, details about Panoramio photos and more.

Please use the comment feature of this blog to provide feedback on this document.

Learn more about using layers.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Some comments about the integration with Wikipedia.

It would be great if you allowed queries in Google Earth to make use of Wikipedia articles to find locations. For example, the query "Lake Singkarak" currently yields no results even though there is a Wikipedia article by this name which appears in the Wikipedia layer.

The gray icon used for the Wikipedia layer is hard to see in many locations, particularly urban areas, due to a lack of contrast with the imagery.

Your FAQ mentions that that {{coor}} is supported in templates keyed by the "coordinates" or "coords" keywords. In that case its not clear how/why you are harvesting coordinates from the following template, which does not use these keywords, for articles like "Padang, Indonesia":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_City

With the growing number of articles appearing in the Wikipedia layer it would be helpful if they were categorized (lakes, cities, mountains, ...) and put into sublayers, each with a different icon type. If you haven't seen it already, this approach is already being done by this third-party Wikipedia layer:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georeferenzierung/Wikipedia-World/en

Michael