O Plameras wrote:
Warning, this gets long, but I think it is a good idea to throw it out
there as someone may have some ideas. Borderling OT, but it is comparing
FOSS with $$$$ so okay..
>> I've been playing with it on the other boxen with the idea of doing away
>> with some guide books that need republishing.
>
> Do you mean travel guide books ? Can you tell us what you mean
> by guide books and what motivations you have to
> re-publish ?
My main recreational interest is bicycles and my motivation is the more
the merrier and the area I've concentrated on is bicycle touring, e.g
rural rather than urban bicycle riding.
Apart from my own "knowledge" base, I've also inherited some other stuff
(Around Australia route, one book and another draft or two). The bottom
line is that to print a bicycle touring guide in traditional dead tree
form requires tieing up about $10,000 per book, which you nervously wait
to see if you recover it.
An alternative is on-demand printing, but laser toner is comparatively
expensive, even without the "colour" consideration. If you want to touch
on the bottom end offset printing, it requires about $100,000 in a
printer (electronic plates {:-), which requires a high turnover to justify.
So, way back in the early 80's when the internet was just crawlling out,
a discussion was held were the ideal situation was putting it onto this
promising beast and people could satellite download as they rode.
Instant updates, all that stuff. Still pie in the sky unless you have
extremely deep pockets as satellite feeds cost (hint, I'll do the back
office stuff {:-).
> Remember that GoogleEarth is a GIS system, a union of
> Earth images and geospatial information glued together by
> SQL-like databases.
umm, sort of. It is a bit like ice-cream. When you eaten really good
ice-cream, there is no way you'll ever touch supermarket ice cream again
{:-). Some people like to subs wine {:-( instead of ice-cream.
OTOH, GE has put great better understanding into geneological research
as you whack in locations of ancestors and find out where they are
located (mostly, has this surprising Isle of Raasay hole, that is clan
discrimination that is {:-).
What I can do is provide routes and link back to a web page with
description. Theorectically, that requires a plus licence of $US20 a
year. So okay. Also, someone has provided file format that might just
allow me to just type it in anyway.
Five problems;
1) I'm tieing my efforts to a MS only package (okay, mac as well, but
that is closed shop hw as well).
2) The quality of the GE background is crap and makes digitising
exceedingly difficult. It isn't feasible to re-ride all the routes (hey,
I'm open to funding offers though {:-).
3) GE is not geo-referencing their layers (base, roads, rail, water,
etc) accurrately. Sadly, I recognise the NSW road, rail data as stuff
that was rejected over ten years ago as not worth correcting (paid job
stuff).
4) "Representation" is very limited. It would be great to really use
colour or alternative representation methods other than just one line.
5) The above all mean that the "maps" that people can print off GE are
rather crude affairs.
> GoogleEarth Free is a smart GIS system but to appreciate how smarter
> than it is already, you need at least GoogleEarth Plus.
Icecream again. I've looked at their comparison tables and do not see
this. Anyway.
So, current thinking is that we could publiscise (sp?) the route via GE,
then link back to web pages carrying the guide information, but we would
have to do our own cartographic work. To do this, we need a real GIS
application and FOSSwise it just isn't there yet. The mapbuilder project
that Cameron Shorter and others are working on (this would overcome GE &
MS OS monopoly) is more of a viewer. There are very good and very
expensive commercial packages, but hello MS no thank you. Beside, this
project just doesn't generate the $$$$ for commercial.
So we can put the basic written information out there now with lots of
limitation, but we would like to also produce a good cartographic
product (aka map), but we are loathe to base it on base date owned by
someone else. As as happened almost yearly, base data offerings have
disappeared almost yearly. Unlikely with GE, maybe. e.g what is the
story with Google Earth vs google Maps?. Anyway.
To produce your own cartographic product, and update it, really requires
a good GIS application. Unfortunately, I would have to use Corel Draw
now as it is the only package that handles the raster, vector
combination with the ease of editing. Sorry, but, it isn't just my skill
level, It is things like node add, minus, move, etc.
Gimp can produce a similar product a bit slower, but maintenance is a
real pain. Note I'm comparing CD3/4/5 to now Gimp. The other CD
advantage is that I can feed data from real GIS sources, whereas the
Gimp has a few problems there. Yes, CD looses geo-referencing as well.
For non-GIS types who are hanging in there I'll explain why this
geo-referencing is very important. Say we did a map with the current GE
hazy satellite images as background, then developed all the layers
(route, roads, water, services, etc) on top of this). Then from GE or
some other source, we can get a far better satellite image, without
geo-referencing, all the other layers of the map have to be withdrawn
again as you have no geo-referencing built into the "map".
The rotate, skew, shrink/grow options are just not good enough. You
really need a full rubber sheet distortion to get stuff to line up where
it should be. Note, we are not talking just about a map for a six
kilomtres ride from Campbelltown station to Georges River Reserve,
showing coffee shops, but something approxing 1,000 maps for Around
Australia Route, then growing for expanding network. A printed map would
be about A5 which is easy to put into most bicycle handlebar bag mapholders.
So, the current problem is finding FOSS or affordable software to do
this good gis work. I have recently been through FOSS offerings, many
and scattered functionality and it looks like a write your own situation.
FOSS because the whole idea is to share the information. If I wanted to
get rich, then I'd still be pushing the dead tree route, but if you know
anything about publishing of bicycle guide books in Australia, then you
will realise that the market has only just gotten onto the second hand
in the count of reprints of bicycle guides (Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney,
Kangaroo's Sven Klinge's Cycling The Bush, WOA's Jim Smith's Blue
Mtns Guide {:-) and ????.
To me, it is all about bums on seats and geting more of them onto them
is what I want to do in life.
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