The Webby Award nominees are out and Google Earth gets the nod in not one but two categories — for “Best Visual Design – Function” and “Broadband”. Congratulations to the Google Earth team. You definitely deserve the recognition.

In the first category, amusingly, it gets a bit cannibalistic (or is it incestuous), with Google Earth up against Google Maps. A third strong contender is Flickr (with MadeinMTL.com and Elmwood Flooring Tool bringing up the rear).

In “Broadband”, Google Earth is up against CBC Digital Archives, FourDocs, Frontline and iFilm. I think the one with the biggest bandwidth bill should be handed this award. :-)

Still, it seems to me that the Webby Award nominators committed something of a category error. What is Google Earth doing among mere web sites? (I doubt it was nominated for its download pages.) Google Earth is a browser, not a web site — you can even view the other nominees with it.

Is Google Earth even part of the World Wide Web subset of the Internet? Strictly speaking, yes, I suppose, but Google Earth treats the web merely as an abstraction layer on top of which it builds a wholly separate, geographic frame of reference for publishing data objects. It’s like a whole new universe has calved off from an existing one.

In fact, this new universe could use its own Webby Awards, as it contains a completely different taxonomy of content — network links, overlays, placemark collections, converters, calculators, scrapers — with many talented content producers already hard at work, on Google Earth Community and elsewhere.

The fact that Google Earth is so clearly out of place as a Webby Awards nominee is in itself an indication of the application’s groundbreaking nature (yes, yes, together with geobrowsers like NASA World Wind). I am about to type the words “paradigm shift” now so I’ll stop while I’m ahead.

• The British Army is planning to climb Mount Everest, and has a flashy marketing website to show for it. Naturally, such sites need “Google Earth Integration”. By now, however, that should mean more than a clutch of placemarks and stock photography. How about some high-resolution overlays, topo maps, altitude coded markers, routes, historical routes, weather, etc…? (Via Adverblog)
• NASA World Wind’s forum likes the idea of perhaps asking Bergen if they too can use the data in their browser. Bergen’s answer should be Yes.
• By the ever-prolific Barry Hunter at Nearby.co.uk, LookFrom, a web app for generating the correct KML for your intended view in Google Earth.
• A blog surfaces, talking up a promised new web application for Google Earth, “M3D Glider”, from a Dutch company called Mediality3D.

  What is M3D Glider? In their own words, the application “makes it possible to integrate many Web 2.0 capabilities into the FREE Google Earth viewer – on real location!” It sounds a bit like Globe Glider, but made with AJAX, and it would be crossplatform, working on Macs as well. No demos or betas, but there is a screenshot at which we can squint. We’ll have to wait this out.

• News from the Bay Area: Insurance Firms Use Google Earth To Deny Coverage (add desired number of exclamation marks here).
• Excellent Flickr-to-Google Earth aide Flyr morphs into Flyr Pool with the help of Greasemonkey/Firefox.
• Jean-Michel Billaut’s video podcast demo of France’s own upcoming geobrowser, GéoPortail, has turned both podcaster and podcastee Patrick Leboeuf into French internet celebrities (in French). Billaut writes that the story is getting some play among those who see GéoPortail as a symbol of valiant France fighting back against America’s evil GIS-industrial complex (OK, so I exaggerate a little:-), but he himself thinks such defensiveness is rather gauche. (More at Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz).

Following up on the embryonic feature wishlist for Google Earth embedded in the long post from yesterday, Michael of the Google Earth team would very much like to know: What is your most urgent feature request/improvement for Google Earth?

I have a couple myself I’ll start off with.

1. A more accurate, higher-resolution height data mesh. Currently, the peak of my favorite mountain, the Matterhorn, falls between datapoints, and the result is this:

   

   Instead of this:

   

   In many places, especially mountainous areas, getting more height data points would do more for the accuracy of the view than getting higher resolution imagery.

2. Auto-suggestion when searching for placenames, like this. Perhaps even access to georeferenced directories like GeoNames?
3. The ability to look in all directions from any given location. The ability to move vertically without first having to look down.
4. A way of getting better resolution at the poles, and better base imagery, especially now that the International Polar Year is soon upon us (and I can promise you, the scientists are planning a big bash).
5. The ability to link to a location in Google Earth directly from within HTML (as described in this post, perhaps). The ability to link from one KML file to another.

What else? Scriptability? The ability to render WMS data natively? Support for OGC standards? What’s most urgent?

(On a different note: Michael noted that the Google Earth file of the discovery locations of 26,000 meteorites that I linked to yesterday is the product of the hard work of Google Earth Community member Majoska, who’s been building the database for several months now, with the help of many people. It is worth linking back to Majoska’s post, where the project is constantly updated and where credit is properly due.)

Realtid.se, which broke the story last week of the censored Swedish “spy base” (HQ of FRA, “the National Defence Radio Establishment”), also read the Swedish blogger who found out that you can in fact purchase what appears to be an unretouched aerial image of the base from the website of Lantmäteriverket, the state GIS agency responsible for the censorship. In doing so, Lantmäteriverket appears to be breaking a law they have just been defending in the press.

So Realtid.se went and purchased the offending image, called up a spokesman at Lantmäteriverket, and had some fun. Translating a whole lot from the resulting article, in Swedish:

— Realtid.se: I have just bought a photo of FRA from your web site. Is it legal for you to publish such images?

— Lantmäteriverket’s spokesman: Yes it is.

— Realtid.se: Why then do you retouch Eniro’s images?

— Spokesman: Hm… Can I get back to you?

Realtid.se writes how Anders Wiik, deputy head of FRA, called back later, to explain that selling such images is nothing to be worried about. Sure, he says, there is a law against photographing such buildings, including from the air. But the images are not sufficiently detailed for it to be a cause for concern to them at FRA, he maintains. Wiik does admit, genially:

I am going to send your article to our head of security. It does all look a little inconsistent. And consistency is not always a strong suit of the Swedish civil service (“Myndighetsverige”).

A bit later, Lantmäteriverket’s head of security Michael Munter calls Realtid.se. (Munter is the person who last week explained to Realtid.se exactly why Eniro’s images needed to be painted over with trees). Munter assures them that in fact the image they purchased is retouched, just in a cleverer way:

In our image there are retouched areas, but not buildings. The secret objects are retouched, but in another way. It isn’t often that we retouch buildings.

So I too bought the official 1-meter resolution aerial image of the base and decided to have another (closer) look, comparing it to what Google Maps shows. Google Maps is far more detailed, and also appears to be much more recent. For example, there are new parking areas not seen on the bought image, and roads that have faded on Google Maps through disuse are still clearly in use on the bought image.

Both maps clearly show parabolas on the north end of the image. The only substantial difference I found anywhere on the base is one new building in Google Maps, around which the road has clearly been rerouted, and a parabola to the west. Check for yourself:

Google satellite image

Snippet of same area, as sold by Lantmäteriverket (1-meter resolution)

Let’s not forget how all of this looks in Eniro (exact same area):

There is nothing missing from the official sold image that looks “retouched”. It’s merely an older image.

In my estimation, instead of coming clean, Michael Munter once again tried to pull a fast one on us. Ironically, because we cannot verify the trustworthiness of the image, there is no means for us to check if he is in fact telling the truth or simply covering up for a week of glib platitudes to the press. And the lack of accountability that comes with him being his own judge and jury in this respect drives home the whole point of why, in an open society, obfuscating censorship is worse than censoring honestly, for example by pixellating.

Norway’s city of Bergen doesn’t just possess beauty, it has brains too. That’s obvious from a deal it has just made with Google, as reported by the local paper, Bergens Tidende.

The deal: Send Google high-resolution images of Bergen for inclusion in Google Earth. For free, as long as Google Earth has a free version. They should be up soon, reports the paper.

Bergen now in Google Earth

The idea is Endre Leivestad’s, who is Bergen Commune’s GIS coordinator. The motive couldn’t be simpler, as explained by Ole Warberg, Bergen’s tourism director (translated):

Choosing a travel destination is a visual thing. Bergen is a beautiful town, and it is wonderful that we can now show this to the whole world.

Bergen soon in Google Earth

The images sport a resolution is 20cm per pixel, and are taken from the same database that feeds www.bergenskart.no, so you can check our a preview for yourself. (Choose “Karttype: Flyfoto” for a preview). Here is some eye candy prepared earlier by the paper.

Two points:

• There seem to be two options available to state GIS agencies. Either build your own 3D browser (as the French are doing) that shows just the data you own, or else give the data to all comers in what amounts to a Creative Commons licence for GIS, as Bergen is doing with Google Earth. (I certainly expect the deal not be exclusive, and open to NASA World Wind to replicate should it be so inclined.) In fact, there is no reason why opening up your data to all comers is incompatible with building your own 3D browser, if you like. (Unless you consider Google a Anglo-Saxon competitor to be kept at bay:-)
• I hope Google has guarantees about the trustworthiness of the maps. By that I mean that all censorship of military bases should be clearly marked as such. As reported on Ogle Earth just a few days ago, Norway has admitted it too obfuscates censorship on maps, a habit it can’t shake from Cold War days. I’d rather have low resolution maps than false high resolution ones, myself.

  That said, it would be even smarter of Norway to get Google to show its maps “free”, after being able to censor them. I wonder if that is the case here.

Date: April 7, 2006 7:16:12 PM GMT+02:00

To: <stefan.geens@gmail.com>

Subject: About the name

Stephan hello:

I think what you are doing with the Earth web has great potential but I am saddened that you have chosen to use our family name as part of your system.

Our family was known in England in 1055, before dictionaries chose to slander us by including our name as a derogative word.

You probably have to much tied up in your process to stop using our family name but if ever you have the opportunity to make a change please do so.

Edward G Ogle Sr.

Orange Park, FL

Dear Eduard,

Thank you for your feedback. Ogle Earth is in fact named in honour of your ancestors, and the contributions they have made to society throughout history. Not just Benjamin and Samuel Ogle, the renowned 18th century governors of Maryland, or the many Barons Ogle in the 15th-17th centuries, but especially Kenneth Ogle, the scientist of human vision who contributed much to our understanding of binocular vision in the 1950s and 60s. This blog is dedicated to the hope that one day soon everyone will be able to see virtual Earths in 3D. So you see, Eduard, thanks to the good works of your family, it’s an “Ogle Earth” after all.

Regards,

Stefan Geens

Stockholm, Sweden.

• Morten Nielsen shows how you can use his open source .NET-based map engine SharpMap to serve dynamically generated overlays to Google Earth via network links. If you code with .NET, this link is for you.
• Have a KML file that is lacking altitude data? Submit it to Nearby.co.uk‘s KML Altitude Filler. (Via Google Earth Community)
• The locations of 26,000 meteorites found on Earth, with data attached to each. How much do we love GIS?
• Wow. Search wikipedia dynamically for georeferenced places, then read the article, fly there with Google Earth or find nearby locations. You have to see this in action, even if only for the auto-suggest function… Something for the Google Earth feature wishlist?
• Something else for the Google Earth feature wishlist: The ability to look up from a location. Why? It would make screenshots like the ones in my previous post much easier to make. In other words, please decouple the viewing angle from the location.
• For coders: OpenDMTP 1.1.3 now supports exporting data as KML. What is OpenDMTP? Glad you asked:
  

  OpenDMTP (Open Device Monitoring and Tracking Protocol) is a highly configurable and extensible protocol for communicating with mobile devices over high-latency/low-bandwidth networks. The protocol is particularly geared towards the transmission of GPS base location information and includes a full-featured reference implementation showcasing its capabilities.

• Another person gets a postive ID in Google Earth. This time, it’s Richard’s grandad.
• A SketchUp user’s blog! I’ve already asked Allan if he would make his models available as KML. (As an aside: I wonder if architects will balk at sharing their 3D work online for fear of plagiarism and piracy. But isn’t everything online digital, and hence susceptible to the same problem, whether it be text, video or photography?)
• Electric Sheep, a 3D content creator for Second Life, gets a write-up on CNet. Interesting read. I wonder, is the only difference between architects and Electric Sheep the fact that the works of architects have to obey the laws of physics, whereas the work of Electric Sheep merely has to obey the laws of mathematics?
• The GIS User blog has a new name and address: Anything Geospatial.
• Something is big in Japan. I’m not quite sure what, as it is all in Japanese, but it does have an English-language title: Urban landscape search engine. It appears to be an aggregator of Georeferenced photos of places in Japan. It’s intuitive enough to click around, but the reason it’s posted here is that there is a KML network link for Google Earth that turns this into a sort of Japanese geobloggers. (Via GE Maniacs)
• Phillip Holmstrad, the man behind the most excellent Batch Geocode web app, ruminates on KML as a markup language and compares it to ESRI’s MXD. Comments are interesting too.
• KML is not the only XML in the GIS space. GeoRSS is another. There’s been a converter around since August 2005, but Ogle Earth missed it until it was pointed out in a comment today by Nearby.co.uk‘s Barry Hunter. Voila: GeoRSS2KML.
• Another XML format for GIS is Geography Markup Language (GML), an open standard supported by the Open Geospatial consortium. Ed Parsons points to the aptly named GML Viewer, while Fantom Planet comes to grips with the 600+ pages in the specification. BTW, the only converter I’ve managed to find that takes GML and produces KML is an XSLT stylesheet called GML2KML by Cybarber, found on Google Earth Community.