Zmarties

With the (possible) launch today of http://www.geoportail.fr, which has been rather hyped as the French challenge to Google Maps/Google Earth, I was doing a search for current French use of mapping, and came across the Gers Chamber of Commerce and Industry geomatics technology centre.

There they have some very well crafted KML files, which show information about the interior region of France, to the west of Toulouse. The files on offer include both sets of placemarks, and also presentation of statistics such as employment and population figures. Neat features about the KML used include snippet control, the addition of a fixed logo, and a copyright string down the left of the view, though unfortunately the statistics key now appears just where the (semi-transparent) controls of Google Earth 4 are.

It looks as if the data files were prepared with the help of GE-Data, a French company which specializes in producing data files for Google Earth.

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... and as for geoportail itself, as I write this, the website is unavailable, so all we have to go on are some screenshots and early user reports.

GNT, a French tech blog, has coverage of the inaccessibilty of geoportail, IGN (which produced it), and of GNT itself, which happened to also rank highly in Google for the search "geoportail". The screenshot included in this report is quite unlike the others - I assume it is from an earlier prototype of the site.