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help required: google earth, field work and mobile devices

posted Tuesday, 21 October 2008

I've a favour to ask for people reading this blog. I'm wondering if there might be a better way of doing the following;

scenario: student field strip ... I want the students to be able to use gps to track where they have been. Record observations, using photos, audio and text. Then share these tracks, waypoints and data with their peers and supervisors through Google Earth.

Currently, I'm using an HTC TyTN2, with BeelineGPS software to record the track, and create waypoints (points of interest). I also use the inbuilt camera and audio software to capture some evidence. The BeelineGPS will export the track in a kml format, and I also export the waypoints in a gpx file format. Both of these can be uploaded into Google Earth. To add GPS coordinates to the photos and the audio tracks I use RoboGeo. This uses the gps track and the camera record time to create a set of GPS coordinates for each photo. I then export the photos with the newly created GPS data to Google Earth.

All this works very well, except ... all the lovely waypoint data, my text information doesn't come across when opened as a gpx file format in Google Earth. It is in the file, I've checked :-(

In terms of sharing these with peers and supervisors, then my model is to upload the kml and gpx files to our Learning Materials Filestore. This means people can create a network link in Google Earth from the urls to the resources in the the learning materials filestore. The works fine for kml files, but they do need to download the gpx file as I can't get the Google Earth Network Link to work with this file type. 

So the question is, is anyone working on a solution that would allow the text information to also be included within Google Earth? Also more effective sharing approaches? I don't mind having to buy software, but the final solution needs to be straightforward, if it is going to be rolled out across an number of uses.

 

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1. Keren Mills left...
Thursday, 23 October 2008 10:33 am

Have you considered using moblog.net? It has a lot of the functionality you're looking for in terms of mapping and sharing pictures and waypoints. You can create groups so it should work well for this type of field trip.


2. Andy Ramsden left...
Wednesday, 29 October 2008 10:05 pm

Hi Keren, thanks, I hadn't considered moblog.net - just checked it out and will trial it on the next warm, dry day :-)