A few days ago Google made their “My Maps” announcment and since then there has been nothing but buzz buzz buzz about it. So I figured I would take a minute to show how someone can use this new tool from Google to create their own embedded maps for their site.
Techcrunch has a good review by Frank Gruber of the look and feel of mapping services. I think it is notable that ESRI’s service is not included in the review. I think it is at least as good as the mapquest service. I may have to find time to redo my review of the acuracy of each again and a more technical evaluation of each.
I recently had an opportunity to use ESRI’s ArcSDE again. It is a spatial database interface and in this instance I was using the java api. I wanted to change what used to be a query using a rectangle into a query using a circle. For some reason parts of the java api for ArcSDE require a C library or something. I gave up pretty quickly on trying to make their arc function work since the documentation wasn’t very clear on how it worked. Instead I decided to figure out how to approximate a circle with a polygon and use that instead. Here is the result of that research.
I’ve been evaluating a couple different mapping software packages recently and the other day I noticed that the same addresses geocoded (for those who don’t know what geocoding is you can find out more about it here) to different locations. They are mostly the same but I figured it was interesting enough to do some more digging and see how different mapping services compared.I looked at the following services. Some of them are commercial services with open apis (ESRI and mapquest) and some of them are non-commercial services with open apis (yahoo and google although google does not have a geocoding api).
For google I viewed the resulting values for latitude and longitude that were generated from a search for the address. For yahoo and ESRI I used their REST geocoding apis and for mapquest I used their java api to their commercial service since their openapi service is only in beta currently.I took 5 addresses located at different points in the US and one in Canada and mapped the returned latitude and longitude from each service. Here are the results:
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