News today is that the UK’s publicly funded (1) Ordnance Survey has come out with Explore (beta), a portal for uploading and sharing… routes.

OS isn’t the first to come out with this. Plenty of other private initiatives have already done the same using mapping APIs. (Check out the impressive Bikemap.de, walk.jog.run, Wikiloc, EveryTrail and Crankfire). More recently Google’s MyMaps has upped the ante with an incredibly sophisticated web-based map editor and mashup manager.

I tried OS’s Explore. Here is my own shared route.

A couple of things quickly became evident. The mapping area is really small. The maximum scale is much lower than what we’re used to elsewhere. Map drawing tools are very rudimentary, and you can’t edit submitted routes. You can’t import routes. You can’t export routes. By-now standard web-map conventions such as using the scroll wheel to zoom aren’t supported. Mapperz has his own list of limitations.

In sum, if this were a private initiative, I’d refrain from reviewing it, as it would compare unfavorably to the competition. But this is tax-payers’ money at work, so the larger question needs to be asked: What is a government agency doing entering a market niche that is serviced much better and for free by the private sector?

The other prominent example from the past few years is France’s government-funded Géoportail. Both France’s IGN and and UK’s OS focus on providing a closed, proprietary portal to their data. OS then hopes that a crowd of users will add value by adding walking and cycling routes to it, as if this will make up for the fact that we can’t make our own route sharing sites from the base data via an API.

The only thing IGN and OS should be doing is focusing on their mandate to produce the best publicly available GIS data for their respective countries, and making it available in a manner that benefits its citizens (and the rest of us) maximally. I’d argue it should be for free, but if not, then at least make the data available for licensing on terms that make sense in the 21st century, where maps are enjoyed by the billions, not by the thousands.

Just as Géoportail will never be as good as Google Earth, Explore will never be as good as Google MyMaps. Spend our money on getting us better base maps to mash up, not second-rate walled gardens.

(1) Just to clarify, although OS is a “trading fund”, and thus is self-funding, much of the raw data it has a monopoly on is gathered by local authorities at public expense.

Now that Valery Hronusov has his Google Spreadsheet code tweaked to create KML for Google Sky, he has put it to immediate good use: Cataloguing nearby stars.

Here is his Google Spreadsheet showing the nearest stars to the Sun, sorted by class. By using the CONCATENATE function, which let him plug the table’s values into a KML template, Valery has made a series of network links that brings this data into Google Sky. And yes, should he change the data, the network link updates immediately.

He used the Nearby Stars Database as his source, and in doing so discovers yet another use for Google Sky:

Also I fixed 6-7 bugs in the data source in this process. GE Sky is a very good tool for checking and comparison of data from different sources.

That’s because until now, there was no easy way of mashing up astronomical data on top of an accurate background dataset. That’s precisely what Google Sky lets you do.

And while we’re on the topic of interesting content for Google Sky, check out this post on Google Earth Community, where syzygy has been “astroreferencing” (as opposed to georeferencing) NASA’s Astronomy Pictures of the Day against Google Sky’s background layer. The improvement in detail can be enormous.

Just what I was looking for to illustrate an upcoming post: HeyWhatsThat has posted an improved dedicated planisphere for Google Sky, with plenty of display and animation options. Take it away Michael Kosowsky:

Thanks to everyone for the great reception you’ve given the planisphere.

Three additions: I’ve added the Sun, Moon and planets; you can now animate the night sky; and I’ve put together a web page to simplify the process of creating a planisphere.

To try it all out, head over here. Find yourself on the map. Select the next to last option (a full day at one hour intervals) and hit “Submit.” When Google Earth opens up with our overlays, open the “Sun, Moon, planets” layer and double-click on “Sun” to center it, then start the animation. You should be able to watch the Sun cross your horizon. (Actually, your horizon crosses the Sun; you’ll understand what I mean when you try it.)

Quick tips for running the animation: A slider appears on the top right of the window when you load an animation. Hit the big arrow to the right and stuff should move. There’s a cursor you can manually drag. Click on the icon that looks like a clock to the left of the slider to set options. More documentation here and at the planisphere FAQ.

I have early reports of things not working quite right under Vista, in particular lots of overlapping copies of the horizon and grids appearing at once. If this happens, make sure the animation slider isn’t spread out to display an interval — there are tiny arrows on top of the slider to widen and narrow the interval, and you want it reduced to just a line — and try turning off some layers. If you encounter this problem and find a solution, please let me know.

KML hackers:

• Can you dynamically change the viewpoint as the animation proceeds, e.g. <TimeSpan>’d <LookAts>? Then we could make the sky rotate around a fixed viewpoint, just like desktop planetaria.
• Any way to set the time on the animation slider when our KML loads, sort of a time analog of <flyToView>?
• Can you tie a NetworkLink to the animation slider? The idea is that if you moved the slider cursor to a particular time, I’d send you the overlays for that moment.

Enjoy, MK

While the default layers also have the positions of the Moon and planets, HeyWhatsThat’s network link has the Sun, and can be used to easily find current positions without needing to fiddle with the time browser.

After a week of sucking Internet through a straw, the connection at home here in Cairo is finally restored, and all systems are go:

• Panoramas: 360-degree panorama collection sites Arounder and 360 Cities get a worthy competitor: ViewAt.org, which has a prominent button pointing to a KML version of the panoramas and a truly wonderful full-screen mode (via the browser). What I want to know is, which of these sites will be the first to convert their panoramas to KML 2.2-savvy PhotoOverlays inside Google Earth?
• Sky spreadsheets: Valery Hronusov updates his spreadsheet-to-KML templates so that they can now also contain astronomical objects.
• Migratory bird tracks: RobinNZ CAD Blog over in New Zealand has news of the migratory Gotwit bird that flew 30,000km, tracked via satellite and with its very own KML track:

  

• Video + GPS: VeoGeo merges video with a GPS track to bring you the video, a corresponding live location on the map and telemetrics data. Fantastic! (Via Mapperz)
• Tiberium Earth: I hadn’t seen this before: Electronic Arts has an extension for their Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars game, called Tiberium Earth, wherein players are invited to model structures from the game using Google SketchUp and then upload them to Google Warehouse. Players get a modeling toolbox with common components to get them started. Here are the results. (Via Slog)

MP3 in Google Earth: GE Lessons has a tutorial up that shows you not only how to embed Flash in popups in Google Earth for Windows, but mp3 files and other Windows Media-compliant files. (This KML is currently not supported on Mac and Linux.)

• Tutorial repository: Digital Urban now has a reference page containing all the tutorials posted there to date. Quite a collection of new-media how-tos.
• RouteBuddy 1.4: RouteBuddy, a computer-based navigation program for the Mac, becomes a lot more interesting with version 1.4, now that KML import and export is supported. Version 1.3 saw the addition of routing directions, which means that the two main criticisms of this program in my original 1.0 review have now been adressed. But is RouteBuddy a must-have at $100, plus the cost of maps? The main advantage to this application remains the ability to access maps and directions when you are away from the internet. Otherwise, Google Maps does a great job for the unbeatable price of Free.
• GeoJournal: A new geocaching application for the Mac. $25.
• Steve Fossett search: All Points Blog has the search for Steve Fossett covered. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been brought into the effort, and now this story too has gone mainstream: The Guardian‘s article on the search has a remarkable datapoint:
  

  There are 129 known crash sites in Nevada, but officials estimate that over the last 50 years more than 300 small planes have disappeared in the state.

  That’s one every two months. Here’s where Google Earth’s slightly older imagery can be of use — to filter out false positives from he new imagery.

• Flight simulator tips: Google Earth blog has the flight simulator in Google Earth covered: An explanation of the HUD and some flying tips.
• Standing back for a second: That’s quite an amazing couple of weeks for Google Earth’s mind share. The release of version 4.2 generated remarkable mainstream publicity from its Sky feature, and then a week later there was another wave when the hidden flight simulator feature was uncovered. Such a double whammy would not have happened if one of the features hadn’t been turned into an easter egg:-). And now there is a highly visible campaign to crowdsource the search for Steve Fossett using an overlay in Google Earth. What’s next?
• ESRI PR: ESRI ArcGIS Explorer build 410 gets a press release announcing its availability. Finally!

The Daily ACK‘s Alasdair Allan has a great find on arXiv.org, the online repository for physics papers:

Sky in Google Earth: The Next Frontier in Astronomical Data Discovery and Visualization

It’s by the people who built the Sky functionality in Google Earth, and the whole thing is a worthy read. Some of the highlights that caught my eye:

The underlying imagery used in Sky resides in a lat/long projection (Snyder 1926). This results in substantial distortion at the poles even when re-projecting onto the sphere. Thus, for regions within five degrees of the pole we replace the original images with a lower resolution view of the sky derived from the Tycho II catalog (Høg et al. 2000). […]

The underlying projection and registration of images in Sky is based on the technology used in Google Earth. This provides a mature visualization platform on which to develop Sky, a very large user base, a simple but extensible interface and a well-defined and on-going support and development mechanism. It does, however, lead to a small number of trade-offs — related to the way geospatial data is served — that were made in the course of adapting the system to serve astronomical data. […]

As with Google Earth, the basemap is not static and we anticipate continued improvements as we refine our treatment of the current imagery and new large-scale datasets become available. […]

It is worth noting that planets’ and the Moon’s icons are not scaled according to their actual appearance on the sky so that they can be more easily distinguished from the background stars. […]

(If that was the reasoning behind not showing real-size icons then I think this was a mistake. In the Google Earth environment, you can always zoom in more to see detail if you wish. More likely, the limitations on controlling the size of an icon via KML as rendered by Google Earth is to blame. Another problem that will need to be solved: Which planetary icon comes before which, and when? Layers in Google Sky behave like Ptolemaic spheres inside spheres, but planetary orbits do not. Sometimes Venus occults Mercury, sometimes Mercury occults Venus…)

The KML tag name GroundOverlay is inherited from Earth, but these are simply images projected against the basemap in Sky. […]

(Pace Vint Cerf:-)

As mentioned previously, since Sky shares a rendering engine with Earth, the geometry of the sky is, in fact, a slightly oblate spheroid (technically, the WGS84 projection). The GIS community has developed a number of tools for handling re-projections of images using this geometry, most notably the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL). This software can warp images from one projection (including a tangent plane) to another and encodes the geometric information necessary for registering the image on the sphere in either an image header (analogous to a FITS header) or an associated “world file”, depending on the image format. While users may want to become more familiar with the GDAL software themselves, we provide a simple, open source tool wcs2kml which will read in an image in a variety of formats and WCS information from a FITS header and generate a properly warped image and overlay KML for you. This tool is available in both Python and C++ versions.

[What! The sky is not a perfect spere? :-)]

Every day at 9am and 1pm, a small group of people who wait in line get to pay 100 Egyptian pounds ($18) to climb into the Great Pyramid of Khufu and all the way up to the burial chamber. Cameras are confiscated at the entrance, because otherwise who will buy the postcards? Luckily my Nokia N95 was let through as it was deemed just a phone.

Standing in the middle of the most impressive architectural feat ever (in my opinion) is a humbling moment. It’s very warm in there, and there is a very deep and pervasive rumble, which we eventually sourced to the ancient ventilation shafts, through which the air was rushing. I took out my camera phone — not surprisingly, there is no reception inside a 7 million tonne stone monument.

A visiting friend happened to be walking up the steps of the Great Gallery so I took a picture. Where exactly were we? ATF’s accurate 3D model of the pyramid provides the best possible contextual information, and since you can now accurately position photos on Google Earth, why not combine the two?

Download ATF’s model of the Great Pyramid, then download this photo, added using version 4.2’s <PhotoOverlay> tag, to see where inside the pyramid it was taken.

A disadvantage of living in Cairo is that The Economist doesn’t arrive at newsstands until Monday, Sunday if you’re lucky. Fortunately Tech Consumer points the way to the online edition of this week’s Economist Tech Quarterly insert, whose leader article is one of the best overviews I’ve read of the geoweb, neogeography, virtual globes, mashups, and the security and privacy implications. There’s references to Snow Crash and copious quotes from interviews with Google Earth’s Michael Jones and John Hanke and Microsoft Virtual Earth’s Vincent Tao: The world on your desktop. It is free to read without a subscription (at least for me, at the moment).

That this article should appear just now and so prominently in a newspaper with a large readership in the business world is a bit uncanny, given this week’s revelation that Google Earth Free has become a legitimate tool for use at work. All those CEOs calling their CTOs asking why they don’t have Google Earth installed on their corporate laptop can now be told there is no legal reason why not:-)

While there’s not much news in the article for those who have been reading the geoblogs closely these past few years, for everyone else this is a lucid and penetrating introduction to the geoweb. If your mother has been wondering what precisely this geoweb is and has been complaining how she doesn’t understand any of it, send her the link to this article. I have:-)