GOOGLE MAPS API AND GOOGLE EARTH API INTEGRATION: DEVELOPMENT OF AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL FOR CARTOGRAPHY COURSES


BİLDİRİCİ İ. Ö., Kirtiloglu O. S., Uluğtekin N. N.

5th Jubilee International Conference on Cartography and GIS, Rivera, Uruguay, 15 - 21 Haziran 2014, ss.433-442 identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
  • Cilt numarası:
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Rivera
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Uruguay
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.433-442
  • İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Mashups integrating different web resources are becoming popular after Web 2.0, which represents a variety of innovative resources, and ways of interacting with, or combining web content. Mashups are based on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), online libraries of functions, mostly free to web developers. Mashups are often used in web mapping or web cartography. In terms of map mashups there is a variety of API providers including Google, Yahoo, Bing Maps and etc. The functionality of available APIs is similar, but Google's API has been used more frequently. In our previous work, we developed a web based tool -the cartographic calculator-, which helps students to understand the properties of great circles and rhumb lines. They could also do some calculations -direct solution and inverse solution on the sphere-, and see the points and lines connecting them on the map mashup. Beside the map view, a virtual globe view was provided. It was a good opportunity to see that great circles and rhumb lines look different in the map plane and in the globe view. This tool was based on Google Maps API v2. After launching API v3, v2 was deprecated in 2010. On November, 2013 this service was officially shut down. Google announced that they deployed a JavaScript wrapper that attempts to automatically turn remaining v2 maps into v3 maps. Although they expect this wrapper to work for most simple maps, they cannot guarantee that all v2 maps stay functional. Accordingly we realized that the globe view within v2 maps (Google Earth view) is no more supported. Google provides another API for this purpose. The Google Earth API is completely different from Maps API v3 in terms of programming. After this change in technology, we upgraded all the code to API v3. We integrated map API (v3) and earth APIs in our mashup, and enabled the globe view again. We also made possible the same calculations on the ellipsoid surface. In this paper we discuss the new structure of Google Maps API v3 and integration problems with Google Earth API.