Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 4, Mapping (on) the Web

#42 Map Your Tracklogs on the Web

HACK

GPS Visualizer is a neat service on the Web, to which you can upload your

tracklogs in many different formats and get back interesting SVG maps of

your travels. As usual, coverage is biased toward the U.S. because of the

many good sources of free geospatial data available there. You can overlay

your tracks on top of vector street maps, aerial photographs, or topographi-

cal maps.

Making Tracklog Maps on the Web

To get started, visit http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/map/ where you’ll be pre-

sented with a form that looks like Figure 4-11. Append

?form=simple to this

URL to see a refreshingly simplified version of the form. You can upload

from your hard drive as many as 12 separate tracks to put on the same map;

currently there is a volume limit of 2 MB of tracks at once.

GPS Visualizer will read many popular tracklog formats including Garmin,

some XML formats, and regular comma-separated values. You can upload .csv

files in the format of your choice, as long as the first row consists of “headers”

indicating the name of that field—particularly

latitude and longitude—so

GPS Visualizer knows what to do with it. So the simplest possible tracklog for-

mat is:

latitude,longitude

24.9699926,121.5500093

25.0620890,121.6402817

25.0620890,121.6402602

Figure 4-11. Uploading tracks to GPS Visualizer