When the MarineMap team started delving into the Google Earth plugin, it was apparent that it supported the display and rendering of KML files almost as well as the Google Earth desktop application. The missing piece of functionality was the nice tree-style legend that is provided with the desktop app. The plugin lets you add KML for display but gives you no HTML interface to work with it. For simple apps, you can just roll your own html/js form. But that quickly becomes unmanageable if you’re adding KML dynamically and need to create a tree-style legend for any arbitrary KML document.
kmltree is a javascript tree widget that can be used in conjunction with the Google Earth API. It replicates the functionality of the Google Earth desktop client, and is fast, extensible, and stable for use in advanced web applications. It’s built utilizing the earth-api-utility-library and jQuery.
Any arbitrary KML can be parsed and represented in a tree-style legend right in the web browser. Try it out.
Kmltree is the brainchild of Chad Burt who developed it as part of the marinemap codebase but had the foresight to realize that this would be useful to a much wider audience and abstracted it into its own javascript library. If you’re building a web mapping application with the Google Earth API, give it a shot!
For the last year or so, I’ve had the pleasure of working with the MarineMap Consortium. We just learned yesterday that the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution awarded MarineMap the “Innovation in Technology and Environmental Conflict Resolution”.
I joined the team after the launch of the South Coast of California site which was already widely recognized as a successful decision-support tool for marine spatial planning. We’ve since been working on version 2 of the MarineMap tool which is deployed currently for the North Coast of California in support of their Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process.
It’s been a tremendous challenge to bring a new version of the software to life and have it meet and exceed the standards set by its predecessor. It has also been tremendously rewarding and having our work recognized at this level is a great honor. It’s nice to know that the tools we’ve developed have been so helpful and instrumental in the marine planning process along the coast of California. Looking forward, I see MarineMap growing beyond a tool for a specific purpose (supporting the MLPA Initiative) to a robust framework for developing web-based spatial planning tools for all sorts of environmental applications, both marine and terrestrial. And this award confirms that we are already heading in the right direction. Very exciting news!
