Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth (ExtremeTech)

Building a

Community Site

C

ommunity sites show information about a community and the

facilities that it offers. The intention is to provide a resource that

might form part of a newspaper, tourist information center, or

other site where the local information is useful to both the community

and visitors.

You can do this in a variety of ways through the Google Maps interface,

but effectively relaying the information in a map means making some

changes to the way information is overlaid on the map, how those over-

lays are controlled, and how the information is sourced and recorded on

the map.

In this chapter, techniques from Chapters 9 and 10 are combined to pro-

vide a more extensive overview of the facilities. The chapter describes how

the information is sourced, how the data is recovered from the database,

and how to build a flexible interface to the information within a Google

Map. In short, you will create your own example of a mash-up.

Displaying Highlighted Points

Displaying simple markers has been described in a number of previous

chapters, but the markers displayed have always related to a specific type of

information. From a simple representation standpoint, this makes the sig-

nificance of the markers onscreen obvious.

For example, the final application in Chapter 9 displayed restaurants avail-

able in different cities, according to the information stored in a database.

The application enabled the user to select a town or city and then display a

list of markers showing the various restaurants. You can see a sample of the

application in Figure 11-1.

̨Use alternative

marker technology

̨Embed photos and

icons as highlights

̨Overlay images and

drawings

̨Identify locations

from clicks

chapter

in this chapter