All posts by Stefan Geens

Content

GEHwar

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Google Earth Hacks announces GEHwar, the first game that uses Google Earth as its playing field. It’s Risk-like, it fosters geography skills, and it boasts some very innovative use of the network link. You can read all about it on their forum, and the instructions are here. In its first iteration, there is room for 25 players. Writes Google Earth Hacks’ Mickey:

The part that took the longest was getting the network link to tell me WHO was looking at a certain location. Once I got that figured out, I’ve made it where parts of the game can be played inside of Google Earth through one network link, while the ongoing results of the game are pushed to Google Earth using a second network link.

How he got a server to know to whom specifically it was sending KML to is still an open question. We’ll have to ask him.

Opinion

Google Earth: Menace II Society

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Dutch blogs are reporting today that the country’s three largest parties have all formally asked parliament the government for an investigation into whether Google Earth presents a national security risk. If you read Dutch,

Kamer wil onderzoek naar veiligheidsrisico Google Earth

Ophef over Google Earth

Onderzoek naar Google Earth niet nodig

Politieke ophef over risico’s Google Earth

Google Earth als inzet komkommernieuws

The last post in this list is wonderfully laconic, and basically regards the existence of this story as evidence of the summer doldrums. The Dutch cabinet, meanwhile, has said that such an investigation is unnecessary, as the information already is available elsewhere. In fact, there is an established Dutch website that specializes in high-resolution images of the Netherlands, http://www.vanuitdelucht.nl/.

One motivation for such calls is undoubtedly a notion that Google is being hypocritical when it willingly censors Area 51 and White House environs but is unwilling to grant other governments the same courtesy. This view misunderstands how the data is gathered, as James Fee pointed out in an earlier comment. Google Earth buys the data mostly off US remote sensing companies such as DigitalGlobe. It is these companies that are tightly regulated — read DigitalGlobe’s product release policy. For it to operate, it needs to abide by US government restrictions — namely, thou shalt white-out the White House. Foreign remote sensing operations obviously need not. US companies can buy foreign uncensored data if they wish. No doubt Google could, but if it did, this would result in even less censorship, not more. And why should it, anyway? Google Earth is a free product. People who must see the roof of the White House can call a French company. Area 51 overlays are over here.

There is a domestic American variant to this meme:

Are mapping software’s [sic] putting armed forces at risk?

OK, I’m pissed off and confused

google Earth Makes Troups [sic] Furious

The defense here is the same: Governments, terrorists and anyone else with some cash can already get at this information. We might as well level the playing field, then, by making it available to all. Wouldn’t it be a trip if somebody on Google Earth Hacks found Osama Bin Laden?

Content

Connotea adds support for geotags

Connotea is a souped-up social bookmarking service, much like de.icio.us but with extra harvesting of metadata from articles in academic publications.

And now they’ve added support for geotags (using exactly the same markup as with del.icio.us and flickr), linking the locations directly to Google Earth.

You can read all about it on their blog. The upshot is that all the articles in a particular collection that have been geotagged now have their geodata available as a KML file downloadable via the “Geo Data” link.

This feature is new and experimental, and they’re asking for feedback, so do try it out.

I’ve noticed that the geotagging data is not provided as a ready-made network link pointing to a dynamically generated KML file, but instead as just a dynamically generated KML file, which creates static placemarks when opened in Google Earth. Instead, you might want to manually add a network link yourself in Google Earth, using the URL provided by the geodata button as the source. The next step would be for Connotea to do this work for us by giving us a network link to download, thus effectively providing regularly updated geofeeds by author or by topic. This way we could automatically keep an eye on all locations tagged for the avian flu in Google Earth, foe example, or all locations tagged by a particular author.

Since so much science is location-specific (think dinosaur finds, discoveries of new species, earthquake research, disease outbreaks, field research locations) this innovation is going to do wonders for contextualizing discoveries.

Finally, Connotea is also compiling a list of geotagged universities, and is asking for help contributing. (I’ve already done all the Swedish ones, so I’ll contribute those soon:-) (Via Catalogablog)

Content

Remainders

Fiach Reid’s Blog: Serving Google Earth Links from a website using ASPX.

Googling “filetype:kml inurl:kml” gets you lots of KML files. (Via gregorrothfuss’s del.icio.us links)

A German Google Earth forum: “Entdecke die Erde via Satellit”

Matt Croydon on massaging “found” geolocation data for NOAA’s weather feeds into something useful for Google Earth.

Wigle Data to Google Earth: Use PHP to convert an existing database of wi-fi access points into a network link.

Process

Ogle Earth: Wrong wrong wrong!

Blogs, who reads them? Seriously, all they do is get stuff wrong. Look at this Ogle Earth post on converting WMS data to KML using PHP, for example — Wrong wrong wrong. As Chris Tweedle points out (on a blog, granted), the PHP he produced doesn’t need to reside on the WMS server — it can sit on your own server, and then all you need to do is point a network link to it. The PHP code does the WMS getmap request for you and then returns the result as KML. (I’ll try this with the Atlas of Canada tonight.)

And then this clearly speculative Ogle Earth post about how Microsoft should respond to Google, written with the intent of garnering objections, has now been turned into “a big rumor,” sourced to a certain mysterious “GLE Earth” blog.

Bad blogs. Behave.