Australian Rogaining Association

Hi all,

I thought I would start a discussion on the use of Google Earth/Google Maps for displaying rogaine results. I have developed a spreadsheet with visual basic routines for conversion of the raw navlight results files into kml. We have been using this to display Queensland results since the 2006 Qld Championships (see the results page at www.qldrogaine.asn.au ). One neat feature is the use of the <TimeSpan> and <begin> tags to create animations of the team routes. Here is an example Google Earth file: http://tinyurl.com/6zekg8

I'm happy to share my code (although it's very clunky) and would like to hear other ideas from interstate.

Cheers, Paul

Post edited by: paulguard, at: 2008/07/14 19:19

I was also looking at doing something similar.

The first problem is getting control coords, and then converting those coords to lat/long. It depends on how the map was made as to how easy that is... I am working on a Javascript-based digitiser that can do that for a map image stored online.

I am also part way through building a web-based Navlight results/team splits post-processor - the intention is to allow an event admin to create an event archive file in RogaineScore, then upload it to a website. If control coords and scale information are available then distances can be calculated. If lat/long calibration, then the whole GoogleEarth thing could be done, although I haven't started generating any KML yet.

All my scripts are in perl. I process Navlight data offline for ACTRA events and then upload to ACTRA website.

At the moment I have been using Google Earth to obtain the control locations. That makes the process independent of the map format. I import the map as an image overlay in Google Earth, and manually create waypoints corresponding to the control locations. Then export the waypoints as a kml file and import into my spreadsheet. I use the spherical law of cosines to get distances from the lat/long coordinates.

Oziexplorer would help with this. It allows you to load a map image and calibrate it with a couple of known locations. It works the rest out. You can then mark waypoints for each of the controls and it will provide a list of lat and longs. I have a licensed copy, from memory it was about AUD 100.

After WRC7 I wrote some python to produce these map images. http://www.uow.edu.au/~sah/wrc7/

regards,
Scott