The following is not really Google Earth related, but it does have that Belgian angle…

Google has now posted the Belgian court’s judgement in full (Google’s English translation — ooh the irony) on google.be, as instructed. The effect is comical:

I went to the trouble of reading it (it’s okay, I also went on a long walk through late summer Swedish forests for balance) and just want to highlight the crux of the judgement, which happens to be unintentionally funny:

Investigations showed that when an article is available on the site of the Belgian newspaper, Google sends you there directly, using deep links, but that, as soon as this article is no longer present on the paper’s site, it is possible to obtain the contents via a link to a version that Google has recorded in its “cache”, which is in the gigantic database that Google maintains in its enormous server farm [yes, singular].

(“Attendu que ces recherches l’ont notamment conduit à mettre en évidence que, lorsqu’un article est toujours en ligne sur le site de l’éditeur belge, Google renvoie directement, via le mécanisme d’hyperliens profonds, vers la page ou se trouve l’article mais que, dès que cet article n’est plus présent sur le site de l’éditeur de presse belge, il est possible d’en obtenir le contenu via l’hyperlien « en cache » qui renvoie vers le contenu de l’article que Google a enregistré dans la mémoire « cache » qui se trouve dans la gigantesque base de données que Google maintient dans son énorme parc de serveurs;”)

I love the last bit; makes you wonder if the the judgment had been different if the server farms were smaller or the database merely “large”. (And the judgement also twice prints Google’s address as “1600 Amfitheater Park Way” — don’t these lawyers know English? :-)

As for the merits of the above argument, it seems to turn on the fact that Belgian francophone newspapers want to make money off their archives, and that Google is seen to prevent them from doing this by offering a free cached version. Google’s defence was that anyone can request that they not be cached (I’m guessing via a server’s robots.txt file) but the Belgian francophone papers are arguing that the default stance should be no caching, and that Google should ask for permission before it shows cached content. In other words, it’s about who should be going through the trouble of asking.

Of course, Google without its cache would be much less of an institution, so I understand why they are fighting this; should the idea of requiring permission for serving cached copyrighted material gain currency, it could spell trouble for Google, though not just for them — the wholesale caching of content (copyrighted and not, by a great many companies, including European ones) is a cornerstone of the web as we know it. The Belgian ruling states that Google serving cached content copyrighted by the plaintiffs without prior permission is illegal. The danger is that in its zeal to teach Google a lesson, the court may have now also put a chink in that which makes the world wide web such a compelling technology.

So we already know Belgium’s military is pissed at Google Earth for the ease with which it makes detailed aerial imagery of Belgium available. (Here is the original article by the Belga news agency that was the source of the television news broadcast blogged yesterday.) The question is, what can they do about it?

According to Belgeoblog, they’re getting support from at least some politicians and business interests. One Belgian senator on the intelligence oversight committee has promised a report on the matter by the end of September, and she wants to draw up a list of sensitive sites, much as the Netherlands has. One security industry representative says that companies which own nuclear power plants are especially unhappy about the images:

They do everything to keep such sensitive information secret and suddenly it’s made public, without an opportunity for them to defend themselves.

That quote either betrays massive ignorance or willful subterfuge — such imagery has long been public, and if they’ve been operating their plants under the mistaken assumption that nobody ever flies overhead, then perhaps there should be an oversight committee report on that.

But, again, what could Belgian legislators do? One possible scenario (if this doesn’t fizzle out) is a new censorship law that will compel aerial imaging companies operating in Belgium to submit freshly gathered data for censorship against a list of sensitive sites (again, like in the Netherlands). If so, let’s hope Google purchases imagery of Belgium before such a law come into effect — and we’d have a textbook case of legislators closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. Another option: Google could in the future choose to purchase satellite imagery instead — no country has jurisdiction in space.

But considering the cavalier attitude of Belgian courts regarding what you can and cannot do on the Belgian internet when linking to news if you’re Google, it’s not entirely inconceivable that they might try to get Google to censor imagery that is already being served via Google Earth, retroactively as it were, threatening various legal repercussions if Google does not comply. Although no country has taken such a step, not India, not China, not Russia, how ironic would it be if Belgium were to try?

• Google Maps’ API has changed slightly. If you want to link to the KML version of a Google Map location, you now need to add an “@” before the latitude, like this:

  http://maps.google.com/maps?q=@48.89,2.36&output=kml

  (Via Google Earth Community)

• Avi Bar-Ze’ev begins a mammoth 9-part exploration of the coming 3D web, (or Web 3D, as he calls it, not to be confused with 3pointD:-). In part one today, some history: Why the precursor to Google Earth wasn’t a browser plugin.
• SketchUp models can now be “published to the web” with the Hypercosm Teleporter for SketchUp Pro, as per this press release. The idea is that you can then view SketchUp models in 3D from within the browser, using a browser plugin, the Hypercosm Player. Problem is, the plugin is only available in Windows, which rather defeats the entire purpose of building a browser plugin, no?
• Google Earth developers are among the winners of this year’s San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation awards for their work as part of the Global Connection Project Team, “developing software tools for use with Google Earth to help disaster responders get accurate and timely information during recovery efforts.” Nobody tell the World Wind guys. (Via SFGate)
• For Mac users, Brian Thoth’s Google Maps Plugin for the Address Book is now at version 2.6, featuring improved Google Earth support.
• Looking for naked people in Google Earth is by now an established sport, but this is new: Possibly finding one in the Netherlands, and then having Dutch TV racing to the scene to try to identify the person. (No luck, though).
• Log2GoogleEarth visualizes live traffic to a website in Google Earth. I haven’t tested this myself but the screenshot looks interesting.
• Gorgeous: Digitally Distributed Environments shows us how to make pixel art in SketchUp.
• IMVU, a 3D chat application for PCs, can now import SketchUp content. Good question: Where is the SketchUp model importer for Second life? (Via 3pointD)

Want an example of how the internet regards censorship as an obstacle that needs to be routed around? Take this PDF (4MB), 45 pages of annotated Google Earth screenshots of Bahrain, apparently being emailed around the Persian Gulf. While it would be nice for us with access to Google Earth to have this content labelled in the Google Earth Community layer, the whole point about the PDF is that you don’t need access to Google Earth’s servers to see the pictures in the PDF.

The main thrust of the PDF is that:

Illegal distribution of property is estimated be 200 square kilometers since independence (out of 665 square kilometers total land area) = 30% of Bahrain’s total areas total area = USD 60 Billion!

Pamphleteering doesn’t get much more visceral than this (even if I have no easy way of verifying if it is true). If Bahrain’s government wants to prevent the spread of this kind of information, it will have to ban email. (Via The Skeptic)

(Previously: Bahrain bans Google Earth, Bahrain Censorship redux)

What is up with Belgium?

First, Belgian francophone newspapers throw a legal hissy fit about Google’s links to their articles being accompanied by snippets of context so that users might actually want to click on them. It’s obviously fair use on the part of Google, but a luddite Belgian court found otherwise, and now Google has complied by removing Le Soir et al. entirely from Google.be. Le Soir must really hate the hassle of serving all that traffic that Google sends them, and then there’s all those bloggers that find their stories via Google and insouciantly post excerpts with links to them! The gall of some people!

Second, and far more relevant to this blog, on Tuesday a Flemish TV channel’s evening news reported that the Belgian military now wants high resolution images of their bases removed or obscured on Google Earth and Maps, according to the always reliable Belgeoblog (in Dutch). Apparently, “the strategically important images should not be available to everyone.” Presumably, they should just be available to people who really really want them for some reason and will thus buy them directly off the vendor.

As recently as May this year, the Belgian military said the exact opposite, and this was proudly reported on Ogle Earth (I’m Belgian, see?). Then, the military said it was “not afraid” of such imagery being useful to terrorists, that such imagery was already public anyway, and that without context it was meaningless. All of those arguments are as true now as they were in May — for example, here is some publicly available high resolution imagery of nuclear weapons bunkers in Belgium that is not served by Google, as an overlay on Google Earth, again courtesy of Belgeoblog.

So what changed between now and then? Well, Belgeoblog thinks that this institutional schizophrenia points to disagreement within the military establishment on how to deal with the ongoing democratization of geospatial data. But something else changed since May: Belgium got a partial upgrade to its imagery in Google Earth, so that now a non-trivial chunk of the country is at the same high resolution as the Netherlands. Indeed, much of Belgium’s new (aerial) imagery is taken by the same company that scanned the Netherlands in its entirety — AeroData. (AeroData happens to be Belgian, operating out of Antwerp’s Deurne airport.)

My guess, then, is that some general nearing retirement discovered Google Earth last week, zoomed in on his barracks, saw the new imagery, and got yanked into the 21st century a tad too forcefully.

The Dutch government’s censorship of AeroData’s imagery has been well documented on Ogle Earth. It’s deplorable, but the Dutch have laws dated from the cold war that allow them to censor the imaging taken by planes in its airspace before the vendor is allowed to take it into the public domain. Belgeoblog says that Belgium has no such laws on its books, and that therefore all the military can do is whine. I hope that’s true (though it’s hard to verify), but I’m also not putting it beyond the abilities of Belgian courts to come up with some completely spurious argument as to why if Google is doing this, it should be banned. If there is no fair use in Belgium, what else is fair game?

• If you’re wondering if you can attach SketchUp models to the new Google Earth timeline, the answer is Yes, as this proof of concept shows: An imaginative recreation of the evolution of a building complex in Ur. Plenty for historians and educators to play with here. I can’t wait to see historical battles played out on Google Earth.
• The fully featured photo georeferencing tool RoboGeo v5.0 beta is out. Version 5 adds the ability to georeference photographs using Google Earth, just like in Google Picasa. The demo is free.

Is it too early to look Google Earth’s timeline gifthorse in the mouth? It’s an excellent new tool — so much so that I’m wishing I could do more with it.

Like what? I’ll illustrate by way of example:

1. Add periodicity: Some datasets have a natural periodicity to them — seasonal water temperatures, for example, or the tides, or the daily schedule of ferries in Stockholm. It would be very useful to be able to compare successive equivalent phases in the data.

As it is now, events that happen in successive days, months or years will also appear in the timeline successively. For example, here are the time-enabled trajectories of the 6pm ferry from Stockholm to Sandhamn on August 30, 31, and September 1. Each trajectory leaves separately; but how would these trajectories look relative to one another, timewise?

To find out, I cheated, converting all the date stamps to Sept 1 but leaving the time component unchanged. Here is the resulting file. It’s lovely to look at, as if three caterpillars are racing through the Stockholm Archipelago (if you set your timeline parameters right — I suggest an interval of 2-3 minutes, played as slowly as possible):

It would be cool to build in such functionality into the timeline tool — an option that lets you choose the periodicity of the data (hour, day, month, year, and perhaps week?), and then an option that lets you choose whether you want to show the data for each phase simultaneously or in succession. For example, for the ferries it makes sense to show the data simultaneously, but for overlays showing global snow cover, it would make sense to show December data for successive years in succession, so that long-term trends become visible.

2. Fine-tuning controls: There is currently no way (that I know of) to advance from individual time event to individual time event in a granular way. This makes it harder to navigate precisely, or to ensure that something is always visible, especially if the timeline is set to show just an instant rather than a wedge of time.

By way of example, check out this really innovative use of the timeline, by Virgil Zettterlind at DestinSharks.com. He took a video of a drive through Death valley, associated some video stills to a GPS tracklog, and then plastered the stills onto Google Earth as a ScreenOverlay, to be played as a slide show with the timeline. (Here is the KMZ file directly.) The effect works very well. Just like with the ferries, you should really see this in real life, as a screenshot does not do it justice:

But Virgil had to “cheat” as well. As he explains, he chose to associate the stills with overlapping time spans rather than just the instant they were taken, so that there is no danger of the user seeing nothing at all. And the ScreenOverlay hack is a good way of forcing images to be visible, in the absence of a (documented) way to control the popup balloons.

How would such granular controls work? Well, I’d be happy with a simple keyboard shortcut, but otherwise two extra arrows in the UI would suffice, just as with current multimedia players.

3. A way of controlling timeline settings from within the KML. Virgil’s problem would also be solved if he had the ability to control the timeline’s settings via KML. How the data is presented can make a big difference to what information is highlighted. There should be a better way than telling users what the precise settings should be — as Declan Butler does in his recent post on the revamped avian flu layer. If a layer is best viewed with the the time wedge clamped to the left-hand side, then it would make sense to have the KML impart this preference.

A related topic is that the timeline stretches to incorporate all time-enabled KML files that are currently visible on Google Earth, even if they are far apart temporally, or of a radically different timespan. This means that one or more datasets will become difficult to navigate.

It looks like a more advanced Google Earth API may soon come to the rescue, however. This morning, Let’s Push Things Forward writes about some new undocumented enhanced classes for Google Earth’s component object model, including what sounds like the ability to pop up balloons at will. That would be useful:-)

(Finally, a bug report: On my Mac, the timeline does not seem to adjust itself after layers are turned off. I currently solve the problem by deleting folders in My Places and then restarting Google Earth.)

In sum, the timeline is a wonderful innovation, one for which the possibilities are just beginning to be explored.