The following story has nothing to do with Google Earth other than the slant it’s been given by the Times of India: “India’s answer to Google: Image Atlas”

Image Atlas will show the globe at a resolution of 2.5 meters per pixel with pictures taken from Indian satellites. It will be published next month by India’s National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA). Adds Times of India:

Mindful of the concerns about Google Earth maps raised by President Abdul Kalam last month, NRSA’s bouquet of high-resolution images will not carry features of defence installations and, therefore, be of no use to the enemy.

Cute. And did I mention that Image Atlas is a 212-page book?

Not, says Geo-Web’s Ron Lake.

I agree with him to a point. I think location references should surround the referring text, not an entire item/post, as that would turn the post into too blunt a geographic instrument. There is no reason to assume that only one location will ever be referenced by an item — a listing of the top five restaurants in Stockholm, for example, would be given little extra value if the accompanying geo-reference was for the location of Stockholm’s town hall.

I don’t particularly like the idea of forcing location information to reside elsewhere, however. While that is obviously a good idea if the geographic reference you are making is a no-fly zone, a hiking route, or a particular vineyard’s boundaries (all containing a lot of structured data), it becomes a real burden to first create a separate object off-site if all you want to do is the equivalent of sticking a pin on a map. In such instances, it has to be easy and instant.

So I propose (and if this has already been done elsewhere, forgive me) the following when it comes to simple geographic referencing:

<a href=”https://www.ogleearth.com” gref=”17.995,59.3019″>Ogle Earth HQ</a>

<a href=”http://124.12.91.02″ gref=”75 backvagen, 12647, Stockholm, Sweden”>Ogle Earth HQ</a>

<a gref=”17.045,59.201″>A nice meadow for a picnic</a>

( and of course <a href=”http://mail.google.com”>Gmail</a>)

<a /> tags, then, should be able to contain href and/or gref attributes. The reason this is a good idea is that both a link to a web/IP address and a link to a coordinate/postal address are, well, links, although to completely separate magisteria. There is never any overlap between the set of internet coordinates and the set of Earth coordinates, although there are many cases in which an object will benefit from having links to both.

How would Ron be able to incorporate complex geographic objects into such a setup? Well, the gref attribute could also take http://-style internet addresses, in which case the browser would expect a file containing KML, GML or somesuch:

<a gref=”https://www.ogleearth.com/somefile.kml”>A nice meadow for a picnic</a>

Why use gref instead of href in that case? Because with href we’d be downloading a file, any file. With gref, we are specifically referencing a geographic description of the anchored text. Here’s how I’d use href with that address:

<a href=”https://www.ogleearth.com/somefile.kml”>somefile.kml</a>

Finally (and thanks for making it this far) if geographic browsers are going to be the navigation tool of choice for online surfing, shopping and socializing within five years (as I believe they will), then these next-generation browsers need to have their own separate way of depicting where you’ve navigated. This proposed setup would work wonderfully for split-screen browsers, where a 3D Earth and HTML renderer appear side by side. Clicking on a link containing both gref and href attributes would result in both the 3D Earth and HTML browser navigating to a new spot — on Earth and on the internet. (Clicking on a link with just a gref or a href would leave the other browser’s window untouched.)

Via The Map Room: Yahoo releases its competitor to Google Maps and MS Virtual Earth, but Microsoft’s Robert Scoble calls both Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s efforts doomed. Why? He says it’s because Google is disrupting everything with their advertising business model — the more people use Google Maps, the better it is for Google’s bottom line (whereas Yahoo has limits on use, showing that they see their maps as a cost burden, not a revenue opportunity.)

The Map Room highlights Scoble’s reasons for why the masher-uppers have gravitated to Google — advertising opportunities and licencing restrictions of competitors. Reading Scoble’s entire post (do so), I kept on thinking he was missing an obvious point, but perhaps it’s only obvious from over here. His second commenter nails it, though. Virtual Earth and especially the new Yahoo maps are useless anywhere outside the US. And a large minority, if it isn’t a majority, of mash-up artistes are non-American, and hence so are their mashups. Other mashups are truly global in scope, and there is only one offering that can help you there: Google’s. Google is the only one getting a boost from the network effect here. It’s had this advantage now for over 6 months. In Virtual Earth Europe still looks like a JMW Turner painting seen from across the room. Try making Maplandia out of that.

Google Maps doesn’t have maps either for areas outside the US, Canada, Great Britain and Japan, but it has glorious high-resolution satellite imagery plucked straight from Google Earth. Google Earth, of course, is even better — it already has a pan-European road atlas built in. Above all, though, it is a globe, and that globe drives home with every twirl that the dataset is global. If you were to paint Yahoo’s current offering onto a globe, it’d cover less than a quarter of it.

When Yahoo, Microsoft, ESRI et. al. produce worthy competitors to Google’s free 2D and 3D offerings in terms of content, then we can start talking hackability, revenue and licencing. But until then, for the rest of the world, this riddle isn’t really that hard.

DCCCafe Weekly reports on Bill gates’ vision for the future, and it contains some intriguing tidbits relevant to 3D virtual globes. (Sourcing is not clear in the article as to when and how Gates’s opining was recorded):

Gates explained his vision of a 3D future as the ability to access distant places from your living room: “You’ll be walking around in downtown London and be able to see the shops, the stores, see what the traffic is like. Walk in a shop and navigate the merchandise,” he said. “Not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality walkthrough.”

In fact, according to Gates, Microsoft is already spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to create a photorealistic 3D map of the whole world in which we can all interact.

…

It seems that Google and Microsoft are on to the same thing. They want to make it so your web surfing experience is focused to a geographical location. That way, we can get the benefits of both the web and real life ÇƒÏ the web has the ability to take you anywhere instantaneously, and real life is, wellǃ∂ real.

So are we now looking at three contenders for next-generation browser? I wonder what Microsoft’s will be called, now that obvious candidates “Explorer” and “Earth” are taken.

The GIS blogosphere is a abuzz about a public demonstration in Warsaw earlier this week of what is being billed as ESRI’s response to Google Earth, an apparently free GIS viewer most people seem to be calling ArcGIS Explorer 2.0. James Fee points to Ed Parsons‘ and Jeff Thurston‘s blogs, both of which have eyewitness reports about what they saw and what the product promises to be.

According to Ed Parsons, the client will be a 15MB download; it will get its data from an ESRI server farm, √Ü la Google; it will be able to display a multitude of data formats natively, such as WMS (Web Map Service), shape files and even Google Earth’s KML; it will have a user interface derived from 3D games; and it will have a real expandable API.

According to Jeff Thurston, the viewer will be available in November; it supports both 2D and 3D display; it can get data from multiple databases simultaneously; and, apparently, if I understand Jeff correctly, you can share the geographic data on your system with other users. (Does this mean that each viewer can act as their own mini server, sort of like iTunes shared libraries but for layers? That’d be extremely cool.)

I’m all for competing with Google Earth to be the default next generation browser. It leads to better browsers. There is certainly still time for ArcGIS Explorer to latch itself onto a PC’s desktop, as those early adopters who have taken to Google Earth by now are also the kind who will play with ArcGIS Explorer. (One thing I’m pretty sure about, however: There will never be a version for my Mac.)

There is potential for a repeat of history here (if ESRI’s product is what it is rumored to be). In the mid-90s, a recent startup that had ballooned into the symbol of the Web (1.0), Netscape, had the best browser, and it was lord of the surf. Then Microsoft “got” the internet, realigned itself, released Explorer (!), and after a few years dominated the market while Netscape was swallowed up into AOL. ESRI is the Microsoft of GIS, at least in relative size and influence, and Google is definitely the symbol of the Web 2.0… This could be a fun battle.

There is still too little information to go on for informed commentary, but that’s never stopped this blog from commenting regardless. I think ESRI has a chance if it truly grasps that for “lay” users, a zoomable globe is simply a more intuitive way to access a large portion of the content currently found on the web — the browser becomes a canvas for connecting cyberspace places with real places. And with the web now being all about interactivity and collaboration, any API should facilitate such uses of the viewer. The current version of Google Earth isn’t quite there yet.

Another observation is that Microsoft still doesn’t have a 3D spatial browser, and there is no news I’ve heard of something in the works. If, as I suspect, our default choice for accessing the web five years from now will look more like a split-screen Google Earth than Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft is going to have to muscle its way into this space somehow. As far as I am concerned, it needs ESRI now more than ever (but you knew I thought that:-).

GIS doyenne Adena Schutzberg has another stimulating editorial out in Directions magazine. Today, she tries to reconcile the boundless enthusiasm us mapping civilians have for mashups and Google Earth with an apparent sense in the GIS community that this isn’t anything special, so why the hype?

I do not mean to be insulting, but this is the “lowest level” of geographic analysis; it’s basic mapping.

She explains where this enthusiasm by non GIS pros might come from:

I’m more and more convinced that what we take for granted as basic geocoding/mapping is “indistinguishable from magic” for many. That, in turn, draws many people to it like bees to flowers. Hence, the hype and the widespread need to touch and use and “ogle” each new application.

I think she misses the point in this particular case, however. The most important aspect of the mass mapping “revolution” of the past 6 months has not been the trickling down of wonderful GIS technologies to the grateful masses. Rather, what’s genuinely new is that the collaborative, social model that defines Web 2.0 has finally been applied to mapmaking. That’s truly never happened before, and it leads to all kinds of wonderful cumulative results that could not previously have been created by a comparatively small band of GIS professionals.

It’s not the technology, fundamentally, but the interaction that is causing this hype. It’s about mass mapping as a means to a social end.

Segue this article in USA Today, which maintains precisely this point when it comes to Google Earth.

An absolutely fascinating article by Declan Butler for Nature.com shows how public availablility of high resolution imagery actually saves lives in disaster areas such as Kashmir — and how in the aftermath of the Kashmir quake the Pakistani government is directly hampering relief efforts by banning free access to such imagery, because it is afraid of revealing military secrets that India can in any case already see with its own satellites.

It’s a stupid and tragic demand by the Pakistani government, but aid agencies need its cooperation, and thus have been forced to comply by removing the availability of the images.

Google to the rescue?! Yes, since late last week as part of Global Connection, but with a major caveat — the imagery they have access to is not the best available, because Google’s provider, DigitalGlobe, has had bad luck with the weather when its satellites passed over the quake zone (according to Declan, who spoke with them). The best data currently is by SpaceImaging.com, apparently.

[Update 16.32 UTC: Declan just emailed the following: “I’ve just confirmed that a note went round from the UN to its parners this morning, noting that after negotiations with India and Pakistan it was reversing its decision of 10 October to ban publicly-accessible images, so images are now starting to appear on UN and partner websites…” That’s a whole week in which aid was needlessly hampered, but at least reason prevailed in the end.]

[Update 2005-10-19 20.00 UTC: Declan reports more fully on the denouement. Via Kathryn Cramer)]