Thursday, July 24, 2008

Automatic map for district office locations

Inspired by a posting on the Google Earth blog I have created a Google spreadsheet with all the location data for districts as well as the municipality - well, "all" means what it will have when I am finished with editing the spreadsheet, right now it just a few entries to play with. They nifty thing about this - the same was as in that other application on the Starbucks closures I now can get a dynamical map with all the location marks, updated every time I edit anything in the spreadsheet. Since this map requires a Google Maps API key I cannot embed it here, but you can see it on my website. Something I haven't yet found it how to export this dynamic map in KML, so it can be included into Google Earth as well.

While this automatic map is of course just a new toy, filling this spreadsheet with the location data forces me to check all the locations, especially which ones I did confirm with the hires data of Google Earth already, and for the remaining ones what is the actual source of them. Then when there's the next update within Google Earth with new hires data for Thailand I can more easily check which Wikipedia articles I have to update. I also added one location in simple Geo syntax to the XMLs in my coding project, so working through all the districts once more I should now add the location into the XML directly as well.

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