Gawker Media‘s Valleywag Silicon valley rumor blog considers the whereabouts of the Google Earth team to be worthy of a post:-)
A Google contingent is heading over to NASA’s Moffitt Field facility today around lunchtime. The airfield is currently playing host to a fellow who’s created a virtual reality headset for air traffic controllers, and the Google Earth people are stopping by to see it first hand.
It goes without saying that Google Earth in stereo would look pretty awesome. Ogle Earth has already blogged Genista’s Google Earth stereograms here, Digitally Distributed Environments has toyed with anaglyphs here, and Google Earth Blog has written up Jan Melin’s analgyph Google Earth movie here.
Local reporting on the Indian government’s hamfisted attempts to come to grips with modernity ranges from the clueless…
NEW DELHI: Don’t expect to see clear Google Earth satellite images of Rashtrapati Bhavan, PMO, armed forces headquarters and sensitive nuclear installations on the website any more. […]
Minister of state in PMO Prithviraj Chauhan told Rajya Sabha on Thursday that the government had given the go-ahead to security agencies to start experimenting with ‘masking’ high-resolution images on the website. The agencies will be using advanced space technology under the guidance of the ministries of defence and science and technology, the sources said.
Sources in the government told DNA that the government is seeking opinion from the ministries and intelligence agencies on how to classify sensitive locations and installations. It is also looking at creating a national list of sensitive installations.
The move, similar to the steps taken by China and other authoritarian governments regarding various Internet facilities, is not being received well by everyone in the government.
Some sources say that the move wouldn’t go down well with India’s image as a liberal democracy and could damage its efforts to attract foreign direct investment, especially in the booming technology sector.
New GIS blog on the block: nearby.org.uk blog is by Barry Hunter, who maintains this repository of mapping tools, some of them focussed on the UK. He’s been experimenting with 3D polygons in Google Earth as a way of depicting data. For example, a visualization of the density of images taken for Geograph, the project that aims to have a picture online for every square kilometer of the British Isles.
When asked whether the government was doing something to ban organisations that were taking high resolution pictures of the country’s secured areas, [Minister of State in the PMO Prithviraj Chauhan] said the question should be addressed to the defence ministry.
Both Tagzania and Mikel Maron at Brain Off are making positive noises about Geonames, a new, free and collaboration-friendly aggregator of geographical reference name sources. Geonames also seems to be embracing another emerging standard, GeoRSS. (I need to investigate further and report back. Has anyone seen a tool that serves GeoRSS feeds as KML accessible via a network link? The two shouldn’t be more than an XSL transformation apart, right? A native GeoRSS reader inside Google Earth would be ideal.) The Gombe Chimp blog comes to mind as an excellent candidate to benefit from serving its content as GeoRSS.
Via Loïc le Meur comes news that Motion Based now has a Mac client up as a beta. It’s a plugin for Safari — and it lets Mac users upload GPS data from GPS devices to the Motion Based site, just like PC users. There they can store and analyse their sports outings. Remember, though, that for companies other than Google, beta means beta.
(“MotionBased is a web application that translates GPS data into functional analysis and online mapping for endurance and outdoor athletes.”)
Peter Prokein and Matt Nolan at the University of Fairbanks Alaska would like your help them to do a load test of their server (at least in part:-). As an incentive, they are making available to geobrowsers the route of the 2006 Iditarod dogsled race across Alaska that began a few days ago.
They also have lots of big flyover videos for you to download in the name of science, but above all this is an opportunity for us to compare and contrast the look and feel of EarthSLOT with TerraExplorer and Google Earth and NASA World Wind, because the same route is offered for all three two applications.
Peter and Matt have long developed and maintained the EarthSLOT server, using Skyline Software’s TerraExplorer as the geobrowser. This combination has some interesting strengths: EarthSLOT was previously covered here in Ogle Earth, where I noted its superior Arctic data and its ability to texture surfaces with images, something which Google Earth currently lacks. (Alas, no network links.)
Adam Schneider keeps on adding features to GPS Visualizer. At this rate it will soon need its own O’Reilly hacks book. In the meantime, here are some of the latest additions:
You can now draw great circle routes between airports on the calculators page. (The accompanying graphic is for the JFK-CDG route.) Writes Adam: “I added this feature because I’ve noticed a few people laboring to build files containing several great circle routes; this makes the process much easier.”
You can set the default output of GPS Visualizer to KML files by appending “?format=googleearth” to GPS Visualizer pages, thus:
Once your route is ready to download as a KML file, GPS Vizualizer now also offers you the ability to download an overlay with the recent local cloud cover for your view. This is a particularly slick touch.
On the Draw a map page, a new feature is the ability to draw extruded paths (i.e. with lines to the ground) which can then be color coded by altitude, leading to eye candy like this…
You can now also add automatically generated distance markers to the paths drawn, specifying the interval on the form. This fuctions is now also available when you draw great circle routes.
And I don’t know how old this is, but GPS Visualizer can colorize your data according to speed, course or distance even if your GPS data file doesn’t explicitly contain this information. GPS Visualizer will calculate it for you (though it does need time stamps, obvs.).
And if you ever get overwhelmed by the options, the documentation is extensive. GPS Visualizer is free, but you can help keep it so by donating to Paypal on the site.
Just thinking more broadly, for a moment: Which is better for GIS data manipulation of this kind — web applications or standalone applications? The latter are likely to be more powerful but also more expensive, while on the web you are more likely to find precisely what you need — and if you need it only once, pay for it only once.
And now that GIS browsers are free, does it really matter where the calculations take place? It would if the dataset becomes too large to download quickly, and I can see problems with scaling up resources (Adam’s server must be busy these days). But otherwise, surely GPS Visualizer is Google Earth’s best friend?
For a sense of where public outreach in science is headed, go to OBIS-SEAMAP — where “Marine mammal, seabird and sea turtle data are being organized into a spatially referenced database.”
Once there, you can search a wealth of tracking and sighting data about these animals. Click on any dataset — say, the Dolphin Project — and you are taken to a page where the spatial data can be viewed and downloaded. There might be an ESRI Shapefile aimed at researchers, but the data is also available as KML, ready for viewing in Google Earth.
This puts interested civilians on par with researchers when it comes to accessing the data, and that’s a wonderful thing. What we get is not dumbed down, and there is no patronizing — instead, there is a recognition that the best way to spur on the next generation of scientists is to give them a sense that they have the same access to quality data as the researchers.
OBIS-SEAMAP is not the only project of this kind that endeavors to just dump the data and see what the public does with it — A whale shark was tracked live last summer, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility exposes its database to Google Earth as well. I hope this amounts to the leading edge of a trend, one that shows off scientists as open, collaborative people, deserving of public support.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
You can now draw great circle routes between airports on the 
