Patrick Aebischer

Nicolas Schmidt

(3380) Web 2.0 GIS: Integrating Google Maps into ESA's existing EOPI Portal

Technical short talk 20 min

Thursday, 2008-06-26, 11:30 - 11:50, Arena 8

• Patrick Aebischer - Maqsis GmbH (speaker)
• Nicolas Schmidt - Netcetera (co-speaker)

Topics

• XML processing
• AJAX, DHTML and mash-ups
• Real-world experiences and show cases

Download the presentation

Abstract

The Earth Observation section of the European Space Agency (ESA) provides remote 
sensing data to research teams from various countries and offers as well a 
portal for information exchange and collaboration. Reports and data submitted to 
this portal have a geographic location and thus are well-suited to being 
displayed on a map.

This presentation aims to give a brief background on basic geographic 
information system functionality (GIS), the principles of web-mapping 
applications and in particular the usage of the Google maps API. In a 
step-by-step guide with code examples we will show how such an AJAX-based 
application can be created, thus giving some ideas on working with Google maps.

In particular, we will describe how to integrate Google Maps API calls into an 
existing application including the ability to display different locations with 
custom icons and to integrate navigation controls. Additionally shown is the 
incorporation of dynamic and synchronous result lists.

To efficiently display this information on top of the Google map, a possibility 
to fetch the needed data with the help of a XML-HTTP-request will be presented. 
The retrieved XML is parsed in JavaScript to refresh the locations on the map 
and to refresh textual information in a separate list. Additionally, we describe 
how XML can be created and managed directly within an Oracle Database using its 
XML data type functionality to obtain results even faster. This solution 
simplifies the integration of conventional data from a database into such an 
AJAX-based application.

A short demonstration of the live ESA EOPI application will be shown 
illustrating the explained techniques. And finally, we'll reveal some tips and 
tricks that we learned that improved our development efficiency.

Selected References:

- ESA's Earth Observation Platform
  http://eopi.esa.int

- Martin C. Brown:
  Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth
  ISBN: 9780471790099

- Edmond Woychowsky:
  Ajax: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
  ISBN: 9780132272674

- Google Maps API Reference
  http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/reference.html

- Using PHP/MySQL with Google Maps:
  http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=65622

- Mastering XML Generation in Oracle Database 10g Release 2
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/xml/xmldb/10.2/TWP_Mastering_XML_Generation.pdf

- Firebug, web development tools for Firefox
  http://www.getfirebug.com/