Google Earth & Proposals Maps...and other data sets - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Anyone else see this article in the Guardian ? http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1982067,00.html It provoked some discussion with our GIS people. As a trial, we decided to see whether we could get our UDP into google earth. At Lambeth, we’ve never displayed spatial info to the public. I’ve heard that there are issues of bandwidth and the overhead it would take to explain to the public what it was and how to use it. Using GE would mean that we would just make the .kmz files available and people could help themselves. We’re at the earliest stage, but I thought I’d post here to share our excitement and to see if anyone else is thinking along the same lines. Here are some notes : Our corporate GI store is Arc SDE. There is a product that converts from SDE to GE : “Arc2Earth” http://www.arc2earth.com/ As it says on the website “Convert & Publish your ArcGIS data to Google Earth with the click of a button. Cool”. There are two versions, standard @ $99 or professional @ $299. Both available on 7-day trial. We downloaded the trial and used it for a day to produce the attached. It is our UDP proposals map. You need google earth to view. 1. Google earth doesn’t work well on our corporate network. The data streaming is too slow. Fine at home on DSL. 2. We need to purchase two licenses : a. arc2earth professional at ~£160 one-ff b. googleearth pro at ~£300 license pa [for putting together presentations for Planning committee and site specific “flybys”] 3. The dataset is definitely “test”. The table of contents is OK, but the layers could be grouped better. There are issues with transparency and displaying areas covered by multiple layers. 4. You don’t seem to be able to right-click a layer and ask “what’s this?”. THIS MAY BE A KILLER PROBLEM. There is the option of finding the “point” that defines a polygon and attaching info to it. Not ideal – it would mean chopping large polygons into smaller ones. On the upside … 5. It integrates into the Arcmap client. Really easy to use. Any changes / improvements are made once in the corporate data store rather than there being a process of “cleaning up” data each time you want to GE it. 6. Linking the UDP and other corporate data (crime, regeneration proposals, traffic etc) is childishly easy. 7. The “tour” function allows people to fly over the borough. A really powerful presentation tool. 8. We have proved that you can embed URL information in a spatial layer. This is preserved into GE so people can click the “show me the details of this policy” and read the text from our website. Or (sexier) you can embed a whole page of information against a point. 9. Spatial consultation – it allows people to amend the boundaries of conservation areas and return them to us. 10. Free from other implementation costs. While it’s a pain not having road names, it means we don’t have any issues with post office, ordnance survey or bandwidth We are a literally a few hours into this. Anyone else further down the track ? If nothing else, if you haven’t played with GE before you really need to. There are some demos on the GE home page that show how it could be used to demonstrate what buildings look like in context. Rich