Local maps one year on from Kuwait

Hard to believe it's over a year since I left Kuwait, and I'm back in Cambridge now working west of London - the shortest commute yet, weekly as opposed to every 10 weeks in Kuwait or every two weeks in Milan three years ago - so just out of curiosity I looked for web maps of the area again.



Enlarge map

Google and OpenStreetMap left a little to be desired in the geography, but Leaddog's Syria GIS Map is very impressive indeed. Aside from the unfortunate symbology (Cross for Mosque) it's spot on.



Then I turn to my old employ's arcgis.com map of a Kuwait University project I helped with (log in as guest/guest as instructed). It's a full Kuwait Municipality map, with GIS and geodesign of the new university, but also the whole city complete with directions including barriers, which I haven't seen on Google or Bing maps! And when you zoom to Salmiya I lived in for over a year, I found the local coop but not the mosque next door.

click image to enlarge

There is no permalink so you have to go to the site and zoom out to see Salmiya the cape (Ras al Salmiya) to the NW, but it's a full-fledged web GIS with measuring tools and even history for the Kuwait University Project. And the project itself zooms in to trees and room-level detail true to geodesign.