Hi all
SLUG feeding spam to the world wrote:
My main recreational interest is bicycles and my motivation is the more
....
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 is a toy compared to a real GIS system that has vector and raster based
layers that can be georeferenced. As you indicate below...
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.
.....
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.
Look at GRASS. It's a FOSS GIS.
http://www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/index.php
It's also available in a Debian package.
However one problem for your bicycling will remain - access to high resolution maps.
The Aust Gov. has decided that even though we as tax payers have paid for mapping
high res maps are only available at a large $ cost. I have a similar problem in that
I want topo maps for plotting cave locations onto. The GIS software is there for
Linux but not the data.
Mike
--
Michael Lake
Science Faculty, UTS
Ph: 9514 8232 Fx: 9514 1460
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