Wookey wrote: > It may be cool, but it's not much of an aspiration whilst google earth > remains proprietary software. I'm sticking to Free viewers we have > some control over.
One option is to target NASA whirlwind instead of/in addition to GoogleEarth. WW is open source and uses free NASA data. The current 1.3.x versions use .net & DirectX, so are windows only. The upcoming 1.5 release is a reimplementation in java and JOGL which will be cross platform. It has currently entered a limited distribution alpha test; a public beta is due in the next few weeks. > Similar problem with the map data. It's not ours, we can't do what we > want with it (like publish the results in a journal). We can't use it > offline, and so on (correct me if I am wrong on any of this). So it's > (very) nice, but also highly limited. There are some sources of free map data (at least in the UK). www.openstreetmap.org has increasing coverage, and scans of the out of copyright 1940s/50s New Popular edition OS maps are available at www.npemap.org.uk under a Creative Commons non-commercial license. In fact npemap.org.uk are using the maps to create an unencumbered geolocated DB of UK postcodes. Which is a good thing generally, so I recommend going along browsing to a place you know the postcode for and adding a bit more data. See http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1936557,00.html John
