CERN’S Large Hadron Collider Portrayed via Google Maps Overlay in SmartDraw 2009

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:30:00 GMT

This is a guest article by a fellow SmartDraw employee, Ben Torrence.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN’s new Nuclear Research facility.

This Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is supposed to be big. Really big. The circumference of the tunnel through which these light speed protons will traverse is roughly 17 miles. By the time I’d heard about it, my curiosity was piqued.

I hopped on Google, assuming I’d be able to find a map of the new CERN facilities, something that would put its scale in perspective. However, I found nothing. We live in the age of Google Maps, an age where any kid with 10 dollars and access to an Internet café can find take capture satellite images of everything ranging from the Pentagon to the Pyramids. Despite all this information that Google puts into our hands I couldn’t find a single scaled image of the perimeter of the LHC on a satellite overlay… but I work at SmartDraw.

Searching official CERN sites, I was able to pull all the images together I needed. Such as CERN facilities on a road map and PDF maps of specific CERN sites.

Once I had these, it was a simple matter of importing a Google satellite map, and editing it in SmartDraw. SmartDraw has a great new feature called Live Maps. SmartDraw itself interfaces with Google Maps and allows you to import images directly. Once imported, you can place markers, set transparent overlays, and add notes and hyperlinks to any object on the map.

On my map are 16 particular sites; named, and linked to their respective PDF detailed maps on CERN’s official site – just click on the red thumbnails to view those more detailed maps. Everything is to scale. I was able to take my Live Map in SmartDraw and export it as HTML, which means that the links are still preserved.

If you’d like to play around with our Google Maps integration and our HTML export capabilities then you can download a free trial of SmartDraw 2009.

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Working Smarter : Google Maps

CERN’S Large Hadron Collider Portrayed via Google Maps Overlay in SmartDraw 2009