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I am working with a web developer who is working with Google maps API, trying to determine what pre-processing steps I should perform (e.g. in R and GRASS), and what can be done within the google maps API. This leads me to the following questions:

  1. Is there a way to convert raster to vector data in the google maps API?

  2. Are there any statistical tools associated with the API?

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2  
1. No but Google Maps on Android is Vector. 2.No, not with Google Maps API but look at code.google.com/p/jsstats/wiki/API – Mapperz♦ May 18 '11 at 1:00
Google in general have been mostly interested in constructing general purpose tools for 'geobrowsing' and only recently with entries like Google Earth Builder (google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/builder.html) have started making inroads into the analysis space. – scw May 19 '11 at 8:09

4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

1.- Nope, only the other way around. 2.- Not directly, but you can use Google Fusion Tables to do some basic queries, avg, max, min and some basic mathematical operations.

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up vote 3 down vote

1 - I don't know well the Gmap API but I don't think you can't vectorize data.

2 - Regarding statistic tool, it could be worth to use a JS stat library like Jstat before sending data to google. You can eventually use a server side library. Depending on your needs and the language you're using you will find something.

A global answer would be you need more than Gmap API.

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up vote 1 down vote

Im no gmap expert, but i would say no to the former, and for the latter, you can calculate area and length (using libraries=geometry) but not much more.

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up vote 1 down vote

Typically I write runtime functionality like this using other libraries like ArcGIS Server or GDAL and expose this functionality to the client via web services (ArcGIS Server REST, ASP.NET, Java Web Services, PHP, etc), returning links to results, links to a new tile cache or geospatial data in KML or geoJSON.

There are certain operations, especially raster processing that just are not well supported in client side web programming yet.

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