Date: April 7, 2006 7:16:12 PM GMT+02:00

To: <stefan.geens@gmail.com>

Subject: About the name

Stephan hello:

I think what you are doing with the Earth web has great potential but I am saddened that you have chosen to use our family name as part of your system.

Our family was known in England in 1055, before dictionaries chose to slander us by including our name as a derogative word.

You probably have to much tied up in your process to stop using our family name but if ever you have the opportunity to make a change please do so.

Edward G Ogle Sr.

Orange Park, FL

Dear Eduard,

Thank you for your feedback. Ogle Earth is in fact named in honour of your ancestors, and the contributions they have made to society throughout history. Not just Benjamin and Samuel Ogle, the renowned 18th century governors of Maryland, or the many Barons Ogle in the 15th-17th centuries, but especially Kenneth Ogle, the scientist of human vision who contributed much to our understanding of binocular vision in the 1950s and 60s. This blog is dedicated to the hope that one day soon everyone will be able to see virtual Earths in 3D. So you see, Eduard, thanks to the good works of your family, it’s an “Ogle Earth” after all.

Regards,

Stefan Geens

Stockholm, Sweden.

• Morten Nielsen shows how you can use his open source .NET-based map engine SharpMap to serve dynamically generated overlays to Google Earth via network links. If you code with .NET, this link is for you.
• Have a KML file that is lacking altitude data? Submit it to Nearby.co.uk‘s KML Altitude Filler. (Via Google Earth Community)
• The locations of 26,000 meteorites found on Earth, with data attached to each. How much do we love GIS?
• Wow. Search wikipedia dynamically for georeferenced places, then read the article, fly there with Google Earth or find nearby locations. You have to see this in action, even if only for the auto-suggest function… Something for the Google Earth feature wishlist?
• Something else for the Google Earth feature wishlist: The ability to look up from a location. Why? It would make screenshots like the ones in my previous post much easier to make. In other words, please decouple the viewing angle from the location.
• For coders: OpenDMTP 1.1.3 now supports exporting data as KML. What is OpenDMTP? Glad you asked:
  

  OpenDMTP (Open Device Monitoring and Tracking Protocol) is a highly configurable and extensible protocol for communicating with mobile devices over high-latency/low-bandwidth networks. The protocol is particularly geared towards the transmission of GPS base location information and includes a full-featured reference implementation showcasing its capabilities.

• Another person gets a postive ID in Google Earth. This time, it’s Richard’s grandad.
• A SketchUp user’s blog! I’ve already asked Allan if he would make his models available as KML. (As an aside: I wonder if architects will balk at sharing their 3D work online for fear of plagiarism and piracy. But isn’t everything online digital, and hence susceptible to the same problem, whether it be text, video or photography?)
• Electric Sheep, a 3D content creator for Second Life, gets a write-up on CNet. Interesting read. I wonder, is the only difference between architects and Electric Sheep the fact that the works of architects have to obey the laws of physics, whereas the work of Electric Sheep merely has to obey the laws of mathematics?
• The GIS User blog has a new name and address: Anything Geospatial.
• Something is big in Japan. I’m not quite sure what, as it is all in Japanese, but it does have an English-language title: Urban landscape search engine. It appears to be an aggregator of Georeferenced photos of places in Japan. It’s intuitive enough to click around, but the reason it’s posted here is that there is a KML network link for Google Earth that turns this into a sort of Japanese geobloggers. (Via GE Maniacs)
• Phillip Holmstrad, the man behind the most excellent Batch Geocode web app, ruminates on KML as a markup language and compares it to ESRI’s MXD. Comments are interesting too.
• KML is not the only XML in the GIS space. GeoRSS is another. There’s been a converter around since August 2005, but Ogle Earth missed it until it was pointed out in a comment today by Nearby.co.uk‘s Barry Hunter. Voila: GeoRSS2KML.
• Another XML format for GIS is Geography Markup Language (GML), an open standard supported by the Open Geospatial consortium. Ed Parsons points to the aptly named GML Viewer, while Fantom Planet comes to grips with the 600+ pages in the specification. BTW, the only converter I’ve managed to find that takes GML and produces KML is an XSLT stylesheet called GML2KML by Cybarber, found on Google Earth Community.

How would New York’s skyline look if it once again held the world’s tallest building? It’s a question I’m sure many New Yorkers have asked themselves. I know I have.

New York hasn’t been home to the world’s tallest building since 1974, when the title went from One World Trade Center to Chicago’s Sears Tower. Since then, it’s shifted to the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur (undeserved, in my view — anyone can add a spire) and subsequently to Taipei 101. Currently under construction is the Burj Dubai, which will be at least 700 meters tall when completed in 2008, easily making it the tallest structure anywhere.

Freedom Tower is set to replace the World Trade Center, but it has received plenty of negative criticism for its uninspired design. What if…

With Google Earth, what-if scenarios are easy. The application already supplies a layer of existing buildings for New York City. Just add your own. Here’s some comparison views of the WTC, Freedom Tower, and Burj Dubai:

Here’s what Freedom Tower and Burj Dubai would look like from the roof of my ex-apartment in the East Village:

It’s remarkable how accurate Google Earth’s base layer is. Here is the view from the same roof up until September 11, 2001:

Compare it with the photo I took that morning as the towers burned (complete series here):

Here is the KMZ file (580k) containing all the content for this post, so you can try out the view from your own vantage point. Credit for the Burj Dubai goes to ZNO blog. Credit for Freedom Tower and WTC models: Equitus.

(Technical details: I had hoped to import Burj Dubai into SketchUp and then export it to elsewhere on Earth, but the Mac beta of the Google Earth plugin for Sketchup proved a bit too buggy. Instead, I opened the KML file in a text editor, and then did a search and replace on the most significant digits of all the coordinate pairs. It worked beautifully, though there is one caveat: The physical distance separating units of longitude depends on the latitude. Dubai is at 25 degrees north, where 0.1 degree of longitude spans 10km, whereas Manhattan is at 41 degrees north, where 0.1 degree of longitude spans 8.45km. So the model of the Burj Dubai used for this post is actually 15.5% too narrow, east-to-west.)

You can’t make this up. German news site Heise Online is reporting that:

In the opinion of the security expert Klaus Dieter Matschke the coordinates supplied by the program Google Earth pose a security risk to the Soccer World Cup hosted by Germany. […] The precision of Google Earth entailed the risk of handing terrorist groups precise target coordinates for possible missile attacks, he warned.

Apparently, Germany’s publicly available coordinates are only accurate to a kilometer. Matschke clearly thinks anyone can get access to missiles, whereas GPS units and tourist maps are hard to come by. Now that Google Earth obviates the need to spend 2 minutes acquiring accurate coordinates, the world is in danger. Bad Google Earth!

Christian Spanring’s commentary gets it exactly right:

So if we are confronted with security issues based on public geographic information, what should we do? Forbid and ban every kind of GIS and accurate map except for authorities (and security experts of course)? Oh wait, it reminds me of something: can it be that less censorship, better public information and knowledge within countries and governments is, let’s say, an improvement that came along with democracy and modern society?

How do people like Matschke, who really should know better, manage to reach such outlandish conclusions? (Original article in German.)

• New blog on the block: 3pointD.com reports on the emerging 3D web, aka the metaverse.
• Google Earth Blog looks under the hood of the Discovery Channel’s KML file and explains how to make pop-up boxes any color you like.
• After the Swedish government admitted it falsified aerial imagery data (ineptly at that), an enterprising publication in Norway asked its government if it did the same. The answer: Yes, because that’s what we used to do in the Cold War. Nevertheless, Norway’s official map site is very pretty, even if some bits of it are completely made up, and we don’t know which ones.
• More than 24 hours later, theunofficialgoogleweblog still hasn’t corrected its post about Honda and Google Earth (while Engadget has). “Hondas get Google Earth: Rumor has it that Honda will follow in VW’s footsteps and integrate Google Earth…” What rumor? Where did that word originate regarding this story when there is a clearly sourced press release that denies it? Blogs. Really, who can trust ’em?
• New blog on the block: TopoNorte.com, about cartography and such in Spanish but with fun and original content that’s accessible in any language. For example, a video of how (not) to ask directions. But seriously now, here is a slightly boring video demo (in English) of an extremely cool-looking user interface for Google Earth: Mitsubishi’s DiamondTouch.

Following up on the story earlier today of camouflaged censorship on official Swedish aerial imagery…

Swedish secretiveness evidently runs shallow. Another Swedish blogger has discovered that on State GIS agency Lantmäteriverket‘s own website, if you want to purchase aerial photography of Sweden, it is quite happy to let you try before you buy an uncensored image of the spy base that is censored in the publicly available data. And at higher resolution too:

Obviously, one end of Lantmäteriverket hasn’t got a clue what the other end is up to. Perhaps they could use a better map? Arrogantly justifying the need to censor (as a spokesman did in various interviews with the Swedish press) only to have the back door wide open proves that these excuses were made up, an expediency to keep us proles happy.

Sweden’s Lantmäteriverket, the state GIS agency, has been caught camouflaging its censorship of the country’s spy headquarters on aerial images it makes public, and Google Maps is directly responsible for the find.

It started when Eniro, a mainstream search and mapping site for Sweden, decided to use Lantmäteriverket’s images to add aerial shots and hybrid maps to its mapping service, much like Google Maps does. A publication eventually noticed that the aerial data provided by Eniro and Google don’t match in a special spot on the outskirts of Stockholm. Here is Eniro’s image:

Google’s image:

What’s even more absurd is that Eniro’s mapping service actually has the roads and buildings, so the hybrid image looks like this:

(Incidentally, Google Maps and Google Earth don’t have the same dataset for this location — Google Earth’s has a random cloud covering the crucial spot.)

It turns out that Lantmäteriverket employs a person whose job it is to camouflage its censorship by painting over buildings with trees and fields. The story made it to Sweden’s lagest tabloid on Thursday in mangled form (of course), as blogged by Patrick Strang (in Swedish). Strang also rightly points out that the only effect of such camouflaging, where you are lied to about the true information content of a map, is to distrust all maps by the same source, in this case Lantmäteriverket. It makes these maps less than useless, especially when Google Maps and Earth is around. And it is behaviour unbefitting an open society. If you need to censor something, fine, but don’t hide the decision. That way lies 1984.

Another interesting tidbit: The agency said it does not have a problem with Google’s images, as they are satellite-based, and hence outside the jurisdiction of Sweden, whereas the images it can censor are taken from planes that fly within its jurisdiction. Countries do indeed have a monopoly on sovereignty in the air, and not in space.

(Early datasets for Google Earth also used images of the White House where censoriship by a US agency was camouflaged, as blogged here.)

[Update 2006-04-10: There’s two further updates to the story, in the meantime: Yes, we have no Swedish spy base and Sweden: Watching the watchers (with Google)