rlboyce wrote:Wow Footleg, that Google Map is beyond amazing! I'd love to know how you guys did all that, as the end result is truly impressive.
Glad you like it.
The basic creation of a caving googlemap is a bit technical, but not too difficult. The generation of the data to display is a different matter!
I learned a lot of the basics of googlemap creation from the excellent Mendip Caves map created by another British caver Bill Chadwick and the additional
help pages Bill produced. There are plenty of resources on the internet about general googlemap creation too. Start with the google's own
map api help pages.
Producing the marker positions and survey overlays is a product of many years work surveying the area in question and drawing up surveys. It really helps that this data can be made freely and publicly available including the entrance positions. I realise this is a problem in most cases in the US. But you could produce a private offline map all the same. But you need the entrance coordinates for the markers, and the surveys for the map overlays. The difficult part was getting all the surveys into bitmaps which were aligned and scaled correctly on the tile grid which googlemaps uses. But once I had that cracked it is simply a matter of editing these bitmaps to update the surveys as discoveries are made, and then running a script to cut them up into tiles to upload to the website.
The full map has an index linked to the cave descriptions for the 3400+ sites in our expedition area. So you can find the location of any cave by site number or name and view the data about that cave:
Matienzo Googlemap Index.
You may have seen the book review of the publication about our expeditions in the latest NSS news: Matienzo: 50 Years of Speleology