INTERACTIVE MAPPING

HEY GUYS & GALS WAS WONDERING IF THERE IS A WAY INTERACTIVE POOL MAPS COULD BE ADDED TO THE EFN SITE! MANY OF US HAVE MAPS OF THE POOLS BUT ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THE QUAILTY OR THE’RE JUST OLD AND WORE OUT! THE CORP. MAPS ARE FINE FOR GENERAL REFERENCE BUT WE AS FISHERMAN KNOW MORE DETAILED MAPS ARE ALWAYS A PLUS! HOT SPOTS MAPS WERE NICE BUT THEY NO LONGER MAKE POOL MAPS FOR THE MAJORITY OF THE POOLS! MAYBE HOUGIE AND HIS INTERNET SKILLS CAN COME UP WITH ONLINE POOL MAPS THAT CAN BE EDITED OR PLOTED BY US THE EFN USERS! IT WOULD ALLOW US TO PRINT AND SEND OR EVEN ADD MAPS TO OUR POST! JUST A THOUGHT AND I KNOW THIS WOULD TAKE TIME BUT I FEEL IT WOULD HELP ALL WHO USE THIS SITE ! THANKS AND I LOOK FORWARD TO YOUR POST ON THIS!

Its a great idea with oodles of potential… but we don’t have the maps to use. More specifically, EFN doesn’t own the rights to use a third party’s maps in a “commercial” application. Putting a single map in a post won’t get us in trouble but to incorporate maps of the entire Mississippi River into the content of this site without written permission from the owner(s) would get our keisters in a world of trouble.

If we could get past that hurdle the implementation wouldn’t be too terribly hard. But that hurdle would need to be cleared first… and I’m not sure someone is going to let us have access to the maps we’d need.

Anyone have any input on this subject?

Hmmm… This one is tough. The way I understand it, you can reproduce copyright information, so long as it is reproduced unmodified and in it’s entirety, and the original author is credited. The legalities of it concern freedom of discussion and sharing information. A lot of political websites have write-ups on the legal specifics.

How this would work with the Corps, which is a state institution, is not clear at all to me. Maybe tomorrow if I find time I can shoot of an email to the RI district office and see what they think.

I have wondered in the past whether someone who makes combined GPS/depth finders (Lowrance?) makes on with a data-logging capability so that the info could be combined in a post-process utility to generate contour plots, complete with fish marks!

somthing like that must be possible….. I think the mille lacs walleye wiffer was made in such a manner…….

James,

Maybe you should talk to the Guys at Lakemaster (lakemaster.com). They produce a CD with tons of interactive maps. Of course, they sell it; but maybe they can give you the heads up on whats legal, or you can partner with them to do some of the more popular pools. I know that I’d be interested in “seeing” where everyone’s fishing. I only get to come down to pool 4 a couple of times a year. It’s hard to learn all of the key spots in the short amount of time I have to spend.

We’ve talked briefly in the past with the company you mentioned about using their maps in a similar but seperate project. No go.

Getting ahold of the maps is the bottleneck here… and since any map used would in fact be heavily/intensively modified from any format we could expect to find… we won’t be able to simply cite the source and get by.