Here’s another blogger who’s been toying with the idea of using Google Earth as a dynamic historical atlas of sorts. Anthony’s been playing with a MySQL database and some PHP scripts to experiment with making a tour of the Roman empire as a network link which you play. It’s more of a proof of concept, but that’s where all great ideas start.
All posts by Stefan Geens
NYT on Google Earth and Security
The New York TImes has a very competent article out today about the security concerns and border dispute issues that have followed the release of Google Earth. To me, the two new/interesting elements were:
1) a highlighting of how Google Earth is used by advocacy groups to monitor tropical deforestation or publicize prison camps in North Korea.
2) Comments by Andrew McLaughlin, a senior policy counsel at Google:
He said Google recently began talks with India centering specifically on images of the Kashmir border, long disputed by India and Pakistan. McLaughlin said Google had also entered into discussions with other countries over the past few months, including Thailand and South Korea. […]
Meetings with Indian officials or those from other nations have yet to result in a request that Google remove or downgrade any information, McLaughlin said. Nor has the United States government ever asked Google to remove information, he said.
I hope the “yet” does not imply that information downgrades are possible. If they are, I hope we’re informed ahead of time, so that we can take screenshots of the most interesting bits and keep them as overlays, albeit privately.
Local is to Local as Earth is to ?
Both Kevin Drum and Walt Mossberg are still clueless as to which applications compete with which.
Google Earth gets better vector layers
Reporting better late than never: On December 13 Google Earth’s vector data was updated. Writes PenguinOpus on Google Earth Community, “Improved appearance of roads (especially in Europe) and multiple levels of density for business layers (eg: dining, lodging) are the biggest changes. Better road data should improve frame rate on low-end graphics cards when roads are turned on.”
Diving into Google Earth
Via Divester comes another example of how geographic content can be made to come alive by integrating it with Google Earth. Dive-spots.com lists dive spots in the Florida Keys area; when you drill down to an individual dive spot, you get the option to save the location in your favourites, download the GPX file for your GPS device, see a map or download the KML and open it in Google Earth. (You may have to register.) The locations are usually in shallow water, so in some cases you actually get to see [KML] the artifacts in Google Earth below the water’s surface. Very nice.
Declan Butler surveys file conversion tools
Declan Butler, Paris-based reporter at Nature, is starting to blog more GIS-related topics. His latest post surveys all the different file formats out there for geographical data, and the conversion tools that have sprung up to bring existing information into Google Earth.
This reminds me above all that I need to re-categorize the past 6 months’ worth of posts on this blog into a far more useful system. Peppered over the past several months’ blogging are several more conversion tools, some of them websites, some of them scripts to make WMS servers accessible to Google Earth. I’m going to need a quiet afternoon this Christmas holidays to make that and other changes to this site. In the meantime, search is your friend.
More suggestions for making Google Earth even better
Philip Holmstrand, who works at the City of Portland (makers of great mashups) contributed some suggestions to the Google Earth community bulletin board in a post entitled Two steps from becoming the next web browser!
What are the two features Google Earth is missing right now, according to Philip?
– The ability to link dynamically to a KML from within another KML, without using a browser as an intermediate step.
– The ability to manipulate navigation around the globe beyond just the loading phase. This could be done by giving us the ability to dynamically load/unload KML rather than just refreshing based on NetworkLinks
Re the first point: We can already link to an HTML URL from within Google Earth. We can link to a KML file from within an HTML browser. But what Philip wants is the ability to fetch and render KML files from links in KML files. Just like how we click in on HTML links in HTML documents to fetch new HTML documents, in fact.
One possible solution is to use a universal <a> tag (something which I discussed here.) These could be used in both HTML browsers and GIS browsers like Google Earth. That way, HTML snippets would be highly portable, as text containing such <a> tags would work in either browser, or depending on preferences.