general mapping tools?

[Josh Rubin]

The recent talk about maps made me interested in thematic maps - for example
  hiking maps
  A map of the counties in Ohio, distorted so the area of each county is proportional to population.

Google Earth (still available as a desktop application) uses

Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML-based markup language designed to annotate and overlay visualizations on various two-dimensional, Web-based online maps or three-dimensional Earth browsers (such as Google Earth).

Has anybody been down this road in Racket?

-- 
Josh Rubin
jlr...@gmail.com

[Neil Van Dyke]

Josh Rubin wrote on 9/6/19 1:36 PM:

>
> Google Earth (still available as a desktop application) uses

>> *Keyhole Markup Language* (KML) is an XML-based *markup language*

>> designed to annotate and overlay visualizations on various
>> two-dimensional, Web-based online maps or three-dimensional Earth
>> browsers (such as Google Earth).
>
> Has anybody been down this road in Racket?

Yes, IIRC, I used Racket-generated KML heavily, plus a bunch of
animation behavior and sim readouts and controls in JS, for driving
Google Earth Plugin, from data served from a Racket-backed Web server
(fronted by Apache, due to other server requirements, via SCGI).It was
for an animated and controllable visualization of particular real-world
data. It was very practical for some purpose, and also crazy-cool to see
working in a Web browser (much cooler than the Plugin demos).

(I was pushing the limits of what the Plugin could do.  For example, at
the start scene, there's a quick animation, as we zoom in and pan around
a central 3D object.  You might think it's to provide spatial context,
or just to be slick, but it's actually to force the Plugin to not elide
some added 3D graphics objects that it otherwise was.)

Nowadays, you might be able to do it portably in a Web browser , using
GL, if you had all the geo data, and satellite imagery textures, but it
would be a lot of work to do from scratch.

BTW, I recently heard Google might be reviving some kind of in-browser
Google Earth, more like the Plugin, and that might be very practical for
some projects.  Though, if you're depending on it, you have to be
careful of things like poor-portability or massive-moat browser
'standards' (moving back towards the walled-gardens that some early
online companies tried), as well as it just being canceled
("https://killedbygoogle.com/").