In the wake of devastation in Myanmar, the HIC for Myanmar has partnered with IDV Solutions to create The Humanitarian Information Centre for Myanmar's Map Center. The map-based, dashboard application is simplistically powerful allowing users to very easily plot data feeds, vector information and overlay raster maps atop Virtual Earth maps. Simply checking boxes on the right allows you to view pertinent information literally with a click.
The site has some extremely useful data assets for displaying on the map. Check one of the "Disaster Information" checkboxes such as "Cyclones" to view cyclones passing through in real time. Or, Alerts, Aid Shipments and Logistic Hubs. Under the "Weather Conditions" section you can view the Weather Forecast, Current Weather and Recent Lightning Strikes. Healthcare facilities are segmented as advanced, intermediate and basic hospitals and listed under "Healthcare." Or, you can just check on Myanmar Information to view information about Myanmar.
For any given asset, you can click on the asset on the map and additional details can be provided in the "Details" tab just to the right of the Map Layers tab.
In addition to the information provided, you can load additional GeoRSS, WMS and KML files into the system to cross reference data between what the HIC has and what your data represents.
The HIC Map Center Interactive Map also provides capabilities for overlaying raster maps for additional visualization. You can overlay the map all kinds of information such as Nasa's Terra Satellite imagery to Weather Central's current surface temperature. The map below is the Weather Central 24-Hour rainfall accumulation forecast.
The functionality on the site is awesome and was built using IDV Solution's Visual Fusion Server which is the toolbox for creating some amazing business applications for some of our premier customers. If you need robust functionality and the ability to overlay tons of data, their product is definitely worth taking a closer look at.
CP
Do you know if there's a way to develop a KML implementation where the KML file does not have to be read in at runtime by a Bing-hosted server -- but could instead be read in on the client side? I'm trying to develop an application right now where a Bing Maps app reads in a generated KML file at runtime, and that KML file has data that is dynamically supplied by a ColdFusion server. My only problem right now is that I have to do a significant amount of dev work on that KML file, and it's a pain to have to publish that KML file to a file that Bing can read.
Tad - we don't have that built into the AJAX API. You'd basically have to write your own parser which is obviously no fun, but that's about all I can think of in terms of making it work.
