On 6/6/07, Dschwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
Maybe we could convince openstreetmap.org to support kml. http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html
Yeah, or create a more detailed basemap for the WikiMiniAtlas... ...which incidentely I'm working on!
May I suggest again that you guys hold your horses on this list.
It is fairly discouraging for someone who spent _months_ of work to develop an add-on to Wikipedia/Commons to see people on some mailing list who have just spent a few minutes with the material make suggestions to toss all the work out the window.
Please please try to inform yourself about the current status of the Geocoding projects _before_ you start a parallel discussion about how to make everything "way" better. This is very unproductive. Especially as some conclusions from the list have been reached months ago on the project page already, making this thread seem like - sorry - a show off for whippersnappers.
Anything based around Google Maps and Google Earth is not going to be interesting to me, as they are both proprietary systems, with both proprietary maps and proprietary software. Useful as a proof of concept, perhaps, but if these systems can't be adapted to the world outside the Google Empire, then as far as I'm concerned they might as well be tossed out the window. (Incidentally, I doubt it's the case that the work can't at all be adapted to other systems.)
I thought it might be interesting to some people on this list to know that there are people out there working on open source systems to rival the proprietary Google ones. [[NASA World Wind]] (which includes a plugin to load .kml files BTW) and [[OpenStreetMap]] are two of the most promising projects in this area, though World Wind (free software similar to Google Earth) is currently Windows-only.
If anyone else knows of some other free projects to be aware of please do post them on this list.
Anthony