Custom style for Google Maps

I am impressed by the new functionality in Google Maps API V3: StyledMaps 

You can create your own dynamic style for Google Maps tiles - and change the look and feel of the base maps which you want to include in your website.

It is quite a natural step, something what open-source projects like Cascadenik and products of other companies such as CloudMade made possible already some time ago. The adoption of this functionality by Google brings this possibility to masses.

If you want to define your own styles for the map you can use the online Style Map Wizard tool. More info and the official announcement is available here.

FOSS4G 2010: Vote for OldMapsOnline.org!

I submitted a proposal for the presentation in the FOSS4G conference in Barcelona and I would like to ask the OSGeo community and other people who plan to visit the FOSS4G conference to vote for the presentation: "OldMapsOnline.org: Open Source & Online Tools for Old Maps".

In the OldMaspOnline.org project we are developing open-source software and designing online tools for collaborative georeferencing, annotation, 3D visualisation, accuracy analysis and geometadata specification for old maps (or in general any raster images) from the web browser.

One of the very interesting and practical results is an online service for georeferencing of the scanned maps or any other online images. You can directly from the webbrowser georeference any online image published as JPEG, any image already published on Wikimedia or Flickr, collection of online tiles (Zoomify, DeepZoom, ...) or imagery published on one of the supported image servers (IIPImage, Lizardtech Express MrSID, DigiTool, ...). In this moment the service is under active development and I would like to announce the results at FOSS4G 2010 in Barcelona.

In OldMapsOnline.org we have also contributed to several open-source projects. You can find our code in OpenLayers (Zoomify support in 2.9), GDAL (GDAL2Tiles), GeoTools, IIPImage and other FOSS projects.

We have produced two new open-source projects:

- MapTiler: user-friendly tile map publishing a la Google Maps: http://www.maptiler.org/

- IIPImage JPEG2000: open-source server software for fast delivery of the ultra high resolution raster imagery directly from JPEG2000 or TIFF files. MooViewer, OpenZoom, Zoomify, DeepZoom or OpenLayers provides the attractive user-experience on the client side (usually in the web browser). http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/

If you are interested to know more about our project, feel free the explore our websites: http://help.oldmapsonline.org/.

To vote for the presentation please visit: http://2010.foss4g.org/review/ and follow instructions there - the deadline is this Friday (May 14th)! I am looking forward to meet you in Barcelona ;-)