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Google Maps Mania
Israel Gets Street Maps
Google Maps has added street maps for Israel.

Google Maps

However, as you can see from the screen-shot above, Israel seems to be full of streets with no names.

That is unless you search in Hebrew. Then the names magically appear.



Perhaps Google don't have a Hebrew to English interpreter.

Hat-tip to Amos Shapira - via: Ira Abramov's Blog

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04 Sep 2008
Wessex Archaeology: Events
Practical Archaeology Course 2008: Day Two

Last night it rained and arriving at site this morning we found a bruised sky and sodden ground. We began the day, as all good archaeological digs start, with a nice cup of tea. By 9.00 am the clouds had cleared and a milky sunshine bathed the site-hut and buildings. After a talk about the day's activities from site director Chris Ellis, we walked up to the site.

Today, after yesterday's cleaning, we began to dig. Each excavator took a feature and excavated half of the material within it to leave a vertical face, or section, through the centre. This shows all of the layers that have formed within that feature and tells us how the hole has filled in. At the end of the dig we will be looking not only for features that seem to form part of shapes - such as roundhouses or square structures - but also for features that have filled up in a similar way. This may indicate that they are contemporary and therefore related.

In the afternoon training-dig favourite Matt Leivers from Wessex Archaeology came to give us the first of this week's workshops. Matt spoke about worked flint and how it has been used in the past. Struck flint can be very difficult to recognise so talks like this are invaluable to our excavators.

At 3pm it was back up to the site to continue excavation. Progress today has been incredible. Most people have finished excavating their feature and begun the process of recording it. Archaeology is by its very nature a destructive process, because by removing material from features we alter them. Good records are therefore most important.

02 Sep 2008
Archaetech
New Media
A couple of things came down the RSS pipe today that seemed well worth a comment. The first, courtesy of Lisa Spiro, is a nice piece of research which perfectly illustrates the point I made in the Athens Paper: New Media sources (in this case, Wikipedia) look set to increasingly compete with traditional ones, even in [...]
02 Sep 2008
mapperz blog
Hurricane Gustav (MSNBC)
Hurricane Gustav (MSNBC) There are currently lots of maps out there showing the status of hurricane Gustav but this one created by MSNBC simplifies all of the huge amounts of data and makes it easy...

Map and GIS News finding blog. With so many Maps and GIS sites online now it is hard to find the good from the not so good. This blog tries to cut the cream and provide you with the newest, fastest, cleanest and most user friendly maps that are available online. News has location and it is mapped.
01 Sep 2008
Archaeology News
3,000-year-old apiary discovered in Israel
The Bible refers to ancient Israel as the 'land flowing with milk and honey,' so it's fitting that one of its towns milked honey for all it was worth. Scientists...
31 Aug 2008
Open Objects
Moving on... new job, new challenges
A very quick update to let you know I am going on holiday and won't be posting for a week.

And perhaps more importantly, I've had an offer that was too good to refuse so after five busy years I'm leaving the Museum of London to take up a post as Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum.
29 Aug 2008
Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK
Google kills british history- not
Vector One points us to an article in the Independent about how google are destroying Britain’s culture by not showing it on their maps. The interviewee, from the British Cartographic Society, is slightly hysterical about this- let’s face it google are not *that* evil, but I have to say I agree with the basic premise, [...]
29 Aug 2008
Wessex Archaeology
Thames Shipwrecks: a race against time

Recent work by Wessex Archaeology in the Thames Estuary has been captured in two BBC programmes Thames Shipwrecks: a race against time. The programmes have been produced by Touch Productions and broadcast on BBC2 on Tuesday 26 August and Tuesday 2 September 2008.

Thames Shipwrecks: a race against time (BBC 2)Thames Shipwrecks: a race against time (BBC 2)

Find out more about the background to our work and involvement in the series over at Splash, our coastal and marine archaeology blog.

27 Aug 2008
The Map Room
Trial Downloads Available for MapPoint, Streets and Trips
The Virtual Earth evangelist blog reports that trial versions of Microsoft's MapPoint 2009 and Streets and Trips 2009 are now available as free downloads: MapPoint 2009 North America, Streets and Trips 2009. Previously: MapPoint and Streets and Trips 2009....
26 Aug 2008
Past Thinking
New International Heritage and Conservation News blog
It seems like an age ago that I blogged about the use of the web, particularly blogging, to communicate better issues related to heritage conservation, particularly as it is a field in the broader heritage sector which is perhaps most shrouded in mystery. Communication has tended to be aimed purely at the professional with [...]
05 Aug 2008
Mapping Hacks
New version of Garnix
We wrote about Garnix in _Mapping Hacks_. It is a command line tool written by Anton Helm to communicate with Garmin GPS units. It will run under DOS 5.0, various Windows versions, Macintosh, and Linux. It was the first tool I used to communicate with a GPS. The new version is here. OEM Store
10 Jul 2008
UK Archaeology Conferences
Stone conservation
17.7.08: A Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England seminar, held at Peterborough Cathedral.
12 May 2008
Professional GIS / GPS Developers Google Group
Online stake-out and surveying calculations for mobile phones
I'm a surveyor in NZ and have written a few pages that perform simple
stake out (setting-out) and surveying calculations. The pages are also
color mobile phone compatible so that they can be used in the field,
using just a basic phone.

The pages include:
- radial calculations (e.g. find centre using 3 points)

06 May 2008
MapPoint B2B
Blog Deprecated....

I should've wrote this a year ago, but I was too lazy to find my credentials, login and actually do it. So, sorry.

Anyway, by now perhaps you know I power the Virtual Earth Blog on MSDN, so if you haven't already point your RSS reader over there. I'm going to try and migrate some of this content over, but in the next few months I'll be deleting this blog.

CP

11 Mar 2008
Online Archaeology Blog
Archaeology Videos
I just finished off adding an archaeology video catalogue to Online Archaeology. The catalogue is categorised and tagged so it’s easy to search for videos. All videos are hand picked from either YouTube or Google Video. Registered members can add their own videos which will be moderated. Watch out for some GIS videos in the new year [...]
19 Dec 2007
Roman Archaeology
Roman "Silver" pig to be sold at auction

I wonder if Lindsey Davis is going to bid on this "pig" to commemorate her first best selling Marcus Didius Falco mystery, "The Silver Pigs"?

"A 2000 year old lead ingot mined by the Romans shortly after they conquered Britain is expected to fetch up to £12,000 when it goes under the hammer this month.

The 154lb ingot, known as a 'pig', was mined by Romans in North Yorkshire, and would have been due to be made into piping of waterproof lining for roofs. Silver could also be extracted from it.

The Romans, who ran well organised mining operations in Britain and also produced silver and gold after invading the country in AD43.

Dating from AD81, the 11 stone pig bears a raised inscription on the top reading 'Imperatore Caesare Domitiano Augusto Consule Septimum’ - a reference to the Emperor Domitians seventh consulate.

Measuring 58.5cm by 10.5cm by 13.5cm, it has the word 'Brig' on the side - showing it came from the territory of the British Brigantes tribe, who had fallen under Roman rule.

The pig was discovered accidentally in 1731 in peat on Hawshaw Moor, which was famous in antiquity for its lead mines."
15 Apr 2007
GIS for Archaeology and CRM
Archaeology and 3D Model of Areca Mill, Valley Forge, PA.
About a year ago I posted a short blurb about an archaeology project I was working on that incorporated a SketchUp model. The model was not so much the focus, or even a requested, of the project, but the data and interest were there, so… I modeled. Briefly, the this project entailed documenting a series [...]
13 Apr 2007
Blog - Brian Flood
Arc2Earth Publisher Update

wow, it’s been awhile. we’re already well into the new year and I haven’t posted anything yet. thankfully, this is not just neglect on my part but the result of lots of development on the Arc2Earth front. There has been a lot of work on the new A2E Publisher (now in beta testing) that creates map tiles and marker layer for use in online viewers. We hope it makes publishing your ArcGIS maps online as simple and painless as possible. Here’s a small update of progress so far:

Map Viewers – A2E Publisher creates a couple of different viewers based on the consumer mapping APIs that are available right now. These systems are robust and have the added benefit of very good base data and built in geocoding for searching. We are working on getting the OpenLayers viewer up to speed but the focus right now is on the Google and MS viewers.

Florida Radar sample (3 minute export, published automatically to Amazon S3)

VE 2D

VE 3D

Google Maps

Google Earth
 


Continuous Export –  One thing to note is that A2E exports "continuous" maps, that is, it works with the ArcMap current extent directly and not through an intermediary image file. This is important when multiple map levels are created since the quality of the tiles will degrade with a single image source (what some other tile creator use). A2E, on the other hand, will continually refresh the map so that the best resolution (and scale dependent symbols) are rendered. It also means that labeling engines like Maplex or the new Cartographic Representations are fully supported.

Marker Layers - If your map contains markers (points), you can optionally export each of these layers as clickable markers in the viewers. A2E will temporarily remove the layer from the map and export it as KML. All the viewers share the same KML parsing scripts so each can view the data and display the correct marker symbol and description HTML. You can format the HTML of the markers using the same dialog that is present when exporting to Google Earth, it allows you to select which attribute fields to export and how they will look.

GMaps with KML markers
 

 

VE with KML markers
 

Another cool aspect of the viewers is the built in search. You can always search by lat/lng and if you have markers loaded, you can search by their name and description. Additionally, if you are using VE or GMaps you can also use the built in geocoders and search by address.

Finally, all of these examples use Amazon S3 as the backend, you can use your own servers but it is not necessary. More importantly, there is no server software needed, all of the processing happens on your desktop during the export. In this regard, it is an extremely inexpensive way to host your maps online. For instance, our last month S3 bill was only [Content].14.

more to come...

Listening To: Mew - The Zookeeper's Boy - And the Glass Handed Kites

17 Jan 2007
Online Archaeology Articles
MIDAS XML and Google Maps by Steve White

Objectives

This application attempted to use the freely available Google Maps API as a neutral interface for displaying archaeological data. In order to ensure that the application was interoperable with other heritage applications data should be both exported and imported using the MIDAS XML schema.

Technology

  • Database: SQL Server 2000
  • Web Programming: VB.NET, Javascript, AJAX, CSS

Thesauri

The application uses the full English Heritage Thesauri dataset.

07 Sep 2006
UK Archaeology
National Trust plans for 2004 unveiled
Fiona Reynolds, the National Trust's Director-General, has highlighted the enormous range of innovative cultural and natural heritage projects opening to the public during 2004. "There are literally hundreds of areas in which the Trust is embarking on ambitious projects that will benefit people at all levels and that build on unprecedented levels of public support" she said. "It is a pity that the Government seems reluctant to take a lead in celebrating the contribution a thriving heritage sector can make to all our lives."
13 Feb 2004

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