humanitarian.info

Rich Treves blogs on Google Earth design, and his ideas are solid (I particularly like his post on 2005 - 2015: the Lost Decade of Neo-Geography?). A recent interest in humanitarian applications, and some discussions with people like Nigel Woof of MapAction, have lead him to develop TMapper, a thematic mapping tool for Google Earth. Needless to say, this is exactly the sort of thing that I was looking for in Bangladesh (and would doubtless be useful for Myanmar, ahem).

Now, I haven’t been able to play with this yet, because my shonky mobile internet connection means that the download is too large and difficult. However from the description this looks like a first step in making Google Earth more versatile, which can only be a good thing. I’m slightly worried by the .NET dependency, and I worry that perhaps this might end up falling between two stools - too complicated for non-GIS folk to easily use, and too lightweight for GIS folk to feel comfortable with.

Nobody’s perfect, however, and at least this is something we can test. Thanks to Rich for giving this some thought and putting in the time - he’s looking for feedback, so if you want to play around with TMapper, let him know.