Augmented Reality: Store locations from SAP BW to Google Maps

[Former Member]

There are times when we do something for one pure and simple reason: "Because We Can”. So when Wally wanted to see all the customer stores in the country in Google maps, I said why not!

We can maintain a master data with the coordinates (latitude, longitude) in SAP BW and write a code which will read these coordinate from the master-data table and generate a geoRSS or a KML or a KMZ file.

There is a growing trend among internet users to use these file formats to exchange publish and consume geographical data, and moreover google maps consume them readily. These formats are more or less like a normal xml file with a few extra tags, that’s all…

The only question in my mind was whether I could generate the KML file or not; but there is no reason why we can’t considering that we can quite easily generate a XML.

So once we generate the KML through ABAP we can place it in share-point or some webhosting site and consume it directly though google maps.

It's cool for the customers to view their stores/plants in the map, and to know that they are indeed having a footprint in the information superhighway.

In fact we can we can write a small app that will handle this in a more sophisticated manner in an Iphone.