All posts by Stefan Geens

Content

Pakistan update

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Google Earth Community announces that new high-resolution imagery of Pakistan has been added to Google Earth’s database:

(October 14th) Google Earth is now hosting updated Pakistan earthquake-area imagery for rescue workers and concerned families. See the latest satellite data from our partner Digital Globe in the Baffa and Mansehra areas and locations near Islamabad and Rawalpindi by clicking on these links. These data-indexing placemarks will help you explore and understand the area of the recent, tragic earthquakes. Click on the dot closest to your area of concern and then click in the pop-up balloon to download an image of that area. Remember to close older images when opening new ones.

Opinion

Google Earth and India redux redux

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The father of India’s missile program, Indian president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, on Saturday delivered a speech in which he called Google Earth a security risk, on the grounds that it gives terrorists easy access to the kind of information they need to conduct attacks. The president, a figurehead without policymaking powers akin to Germany’s and Israel’s presidents, came out with these quotes, among others (AP story, The Statesman, India, The Hindu Business Line, The Times of India)

You will realise that some of the developing countries, already facing terrorist attacks, have been singularly chosen for sourcing such high-resolution images.

When you look deeper into it, you would realise that laws in some countries regarding spatial observations over their territories and UN recommendations about the display of spatial observations are inadequate.

His conspiracy theory in the first quote is easily dismissable. Developing countries are proportionally underrepresented on Google Earth, not overrepresented, when it comes to high-resolution imagery. See for yourself. Recent updates are not “biased” towards the developing world either. I wish they were, in fact, as some of the world’s most amazing sights are not to be found in European and American suburbs. And among developing countries, Iraq has the most coverage, due to the war there.

Furthermore, making national laws against what satellites in Earth orbit can and cannot see is like legislating against a tidal wave. And suggesting that the UN take on the role of global censor betrays a complete lack of understanding about the purpose of that body. Fundamentally, governments do not need to be protected from their citizens; citizens’ rights need to be protected from governments and overzealous, unwitting civil servants like Kalam. Google Earth helps by making that process irreversible. Complaining government officials are a sign of progress.

Reviews

MeHere

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MeHere, by Glenn Murphy, is an especially refined-looking entry in the live-tracking software subgenre.

MeHere is a PC app that gets input from a GPS device and serves it from the localhost in a variety of formats that other apps can then use to display your location in realtime. It works for Google Earth but also a whole range of mapping sites with Greasemonkey. Several scripts are already available, but anyone can make their own.

In Google Earth, each GPS device can be tracked simply by creating a network link that refers to the KML file published by MeHere. Many devices can thus be tracked simultaneously.

There is also a forum for help. This piece of free software looks very simple and developer friendly, which should greatly aid its adoption throughout the Web 2.0.

Reviews

Virtual globes get their own blog

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There’s a new blog on the block: Geography 2.0: Virtual Globes, by Alan Glennon at the UCSB’s geography department.

The blog seems to be a companion to an upcoming session on virtual globes at the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting in Chicago next March, but if this blog is going to be a place to post and discuss ruminations on this relatively new way of displaying spatial data, then it certainly looks very promising.

For example, a recent post has a listing of all the virtual globes that have been created to date. I for one would love to know what the particular innovations of each were.

Uncategorized

Falkands vs. Malvinas

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A confusing and confused article in the UK tabloid the Sun states that “the British islands in the South Atlantic have been given Argentinian place names on the interactive Google Earth site.”

falkinas.gifWell, in Maps the Spanish names are appended in parentheses. I have no problems with that, as it makes the map more useful to finding the islands when cross-referencing from other (Spanish-language) sources. (No access to Earth right now so if somebody could check…)

The Sun, however, loves to get on a patriotic high horse every so often, so we’ll see how this plays out.

[Update 15:20 UTC: Just had a look at Google Earth’s representation of the Falklands. Searching for either “malvinas” or “falkland islands” (but not “falklands”) gets you there, with your search term of choice displayed atop the islands. Once there, if you have place names turned on you also get to see an ‘official’ “Falkand Islands” title. If you have the Google Earth BBS Earthbrowsing category turned on, then you also get to see a collection of Spanish-language placemarks. Perhaps it is this that the Sun objected to? It’s slim pickings for patriotic fulminating in any case.]

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Uncategorized

Taiwan it is, then

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The Map Room reports that Google has removed the “Province of China” suffix to Taiwan in Google Maps. They’ve done the right thing.

It will be interesting to see if this is the end of the matter. The reason most other countries do not recognize Taiwan is that the People’s Republic of China otherwise snubs them when it comes to business and trade. This tends to be too high a cost for the sake of “supporting” Taiwan through legal recognition when most of the benefits can already be had through informal channels and trade links.

Might China start conducting a similar policy when it comes to companies? Many companies wanting to do business in China, most recently Yahoo, have willingly cut deals that we in the west would never stand for. It would not be inconceivable that the ease of doing business in China for Google might depend on it falling into line when it comes to its cartographic labelling (not that I want to give anyone any ideas). Which the “no evil” option might be for Google in such a case is clear to me, however.

Content

Catching up (again)

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I’m back from a week in the greatest city in the world, and it’s time to catch up re Google Earth:

Mark McLaren looks at an implementation of XSLT to transform GPX into KML, and then updates his own conversion script (using ECMAScript, which is JavaScript by another name (I had no clue)).

My usual monthly “Geobloggers just got even better” link.

RobiNZ Blog mongers the rumor that SketchUp could be bought by Google. That would certainly make people happy, which certainly increases the likelihood that this is wishful thinking. (But if it isn’t, Mac version, please?)

But this is nice: Sketchup now has, in “pre-Beta”, a Google Earth Importer/Exporter (“If you want to send 3d models from SketchUp to Google Earth, this is the place to start”) and a Shapefile Importer (“If you have access to a GIS system, chances are you have access to useful building footprint data in the *.shp file format. Install this if you want to give SketchUp the ability to read these files and convert them into 3D models.”)

Mapdex blog provides the Coldfusion code for building Google Maps tiles via ArcIMS. Why does this news show up on a Google Earth-centric blog? Because we already know how to show Maps-like tiles in Google Earth. This, then should make it easier to publish large-scale detailed content, as it’s just become a lot more scalable.

Raiding Declan’s bookmarks now: EarthPlot (“processes geographic based data to generate a variety of maps within Google Earth”, $30) and EarthPaint (“allows the user to create freehand drawings and publish them as Google Earth ground overlays”, $15). Look intriguing, but only for PC.

Phone2Gearth lets Symbian phones with GPS convert this GPS data directly to KML, ready for Google Earth.

Major Google Earth satellite imagery contributor DigitalGlobe is launching two new satellites. Both seem geared towards making data updates more frequent.

Via All Points Blog, another Google geo-job.

Spatially Adjusted likes Dave Bouwman’s article “The GIS long tail“. Commenter Marc does not.

Zmarties likes large KML files, but notes that Google Earth becomes unstable when you use them, and comes up with some suggestions for Google Earth’s developers.

Tao of Mac dabbles some more with parsers, building a GPX parser that can slot quite nicely into something that produces KML.

Google Earth Blog finds another paragliding forum. (Other ones here and here.)