August 02, 2007

City of Nanaimo and more kudos from the media - here's details on what Nanaimo serves up for Google earth users

The City of Nanaimo, BC (that's on Vancouver Island where I used to live) is getting some great attention thanks to some recent comments from Gogole CTO Michael Jones made at GeoWeb event, Vancouver. An article hit the Victoria Times Colonist online but really didn't say too much unfortunately. From the article... With the quick click of a mouse, Google Earth will provide any Internet user with a 3-D image of buildings in downtown Nanaimo or the curved streets that cover the city's north end. That's pretty much all that the reporter provides their readers. Unfortunately they didn't really delve into the who, what, where, when, why or how to really explain the story.. too bad!

Of interest, I noted a year ago how the City of Nanaimo was putting their data up in KML and provided some detailed information about what users could do with these data. See the article here

Interesting to note that The City of Nanaimo is also very proactive AutoCAD house and user of OSGeo technology - aka MapGuide Open Source. The city's "Mapguide & GIS guru", Jason Birch hasn't received mention in any of the recent press.. too bad as Jason has been quite instrumental in getting Google Earth data rolling out of the city's website.. Jason, you still there?? He's also their MapGuide expert and very involved with the open source movement. You can follow Jason on his Random Nodes blog - (hey Jason, where's the link to AnyGeo blog ;0)!!


Of note, the City of Portland has done some cool things with G. Earth and the City of Hamburg (as pointed out by Gearth blog) has some great 3D buildings now available in the Google Earth layer... a great example of what cities could/should be doing with all that great data they have locked up... especially 3D data!

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm still around, pretty busy though. Last couple days have been interesting to say the least. There was a short piece on the A Channel Island Report last night and the local newspapers (one of which I'm not to happy with right now) today. I hope to see something in the Globe & Mail tomorrow, and my CTO will be doing an interview with CBC Radio on Monday.

Hey, I'd swear I had a link to you. Maybe it got lost on one of your URL changes? :)

gletham Communications said...

good to hear from you Jason and kudos on all the accolades... I'll give you a plug since nobody else is! ;0) On a side note, kudos also to the City of Portland who has also been very proactive in using Google APIs and Google EArth to share information with their residents. See http://www.portlandmaps.com/google.cfm