Nature has published a mammoth avian flu database as a KML network link. It’s easier to let Declan Butler, the reporter at Nature who built it, explain (which he does on his blog):

Nature has a Google Earth map of avian flu outbreaks online tonight. The visualization of avian flu outbreaks is the first online map, to my knowledge, of each of the more than 1800 individual outbreaks of avian flu in birds that have been reported over the past two years. It also provides a geographical overview of confirmed human cases of infection with the H5N1 influenza virus. The network link is available here and on the GE forum, here.

Declan spends the rest of his post outlining his methodology and sources. He also links to other avian flu maps.

The contents of Nature‘s avian flu network link are byzantine. In addition to their obvious medical and educational benefits, they show up two things about Google Earth: The application’s strengths, and the application’s current limitations.

The strengths are clear: Google Earth was built to visualize exactly this kind of data, and the way network links work ensures that the data stays up-to-date on every installation that has it.

The limitations are as follows. One of them Declan also notes: The Places panel’s nested folder GUI model overwhelms the user when a dataset gets to be this large. In fact, it overwhelms if you simply have too many network links and placemarks listed, whether they’re activated or not. Nested folders worked as a navigation tool when only a few datasets were on offer. But KML is taking off like wildfire. Imagine trying to surf the web by using only the links in your nested bookmark folders in your browser — no following hyperlinks to other sites allowed. You could for a while, but you’d go mad quite quickly.

The solution, I think, is that the Places panel needs to be complemented by an interactive browser window, in which such information can be portrayed more intuitively. We’ve recently had a taste of what that can be like. I think it’s the way to go. The Places folder will then become the equivalent of the bookmarks pane in web browsers: Useful, but not the focus of navigation.

The second limitation is that Declan’s data is screaming for time-line based display: the incidents of avian flu come with dates, so they should be showable in succession, adding an entire dimension to the publishing of the data. Google Earth can’t do that. Yet.

But it might soon. There are undocumented KML tags that allow for date- and time-stamping, and Google CTO Michael Jones has already displayed a prototype of a “time browser” for Google Earth. When that gets added to a future version of Google Earth, Declan will be able to use it simply by retagging data he already has in his database. It will make for quite a showcase:-)

Lone amateur bloggers can (sometimes) be forgiven for getting the facts wrong or riding a meme without verifying sources, but pro blogs and blogs associated with professional publications shouldn’t get off so lightly, in my book.

So for the record: Preston Gralla’s post, on TechWeb’s Networking Pipeline site, VP Cheney To Google: Who’s Your Daddy?, is fiction. Most likely, it’s due to his ignorance of how such imagery is collected.

And while we’re on the topic of corrections: Maureen Dowd is not the New York Times. Dowd is a columnist free to espouse the most outlandish conspiracy theories, while The New York Times has its own editorial voice and news service, and is in the habit of fact checking (recent lapses notwithstanding).

Another day, another well researched and accurate article in the Hindustan Times. Google seems eager to set the record straight, making both International PR manager Debbie Frost and Senior Policy Counsel Andrew McLaughlin available for interview. Their arguments will be familiar to readers of this blog, but it’s good to have the following on the record, courtesy of McLaughlin:

“… The US government has never made any request that Google make changes to the Google Earth service. Nor to date has any other government formally requested Google to remove or obscure particular places.”

(Via lastingnews.com, again)

French newspaper Le Figaro has an article on censorship in Google Earth, Maps and NASA World Wind. Despite the slightly breathless title (in English, “Censorship scrambles maps on Google Earth”), the article is quite balanced and accurate, mentioning that updates to Google Earth’s data have replaced censored images with uncensored images (with the exception of the Vice President’s residence.)

One thing it points out, and which I hadn’t noticed before, is that the earliest, censored imagery of the White House (still visible on Google Maps today) didn’t just replace the roof of the White House with beige rectangles — somebody went and photoshopped the pool and the Rose Garden with trees as well. Look:

Maps:

Earth:

Now isn’t that special? To me, there is a big difference, in a democracy, between clearly marking an area as censored (for whatever dubious security reason) and actively falsifying information. The latter action is tantamount to lying to one’s own citizens, and is not qualitatively different to KGB efforts to erase out-of-favour figures in photos. If the pool is crucial to national defence, by all means pixelate it, if you really have to. But pretending that the president does not have a pool, and not realizing the difference between censorship and falsification, is creepy.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s news on Thailand’s upcoming public satellite imagery database, an article in the Bangkok Post quotes somebody from the project as saying that “Digital Thailand would blot out security-sensitive areas.”

It will be fun using Google Earth to find out which sites Thailand considers sensitive. (Via All Points Blog.)

Laurent of lastingnews.com points to an interesting article in the Hindustan Times, Ganging up against Google, about the expert group the Indian government has convened to see if and how it should try to pressure Google into degrading the resolution of imagery of India in Google Earth.

What’s interesting is that the article gets two opposing points of view on the matter. One person, the surveyor-general of India, Major-General Gopal Rao, seems to believe what he reads in India’s more jingoistic press:

Rao told the Hindustan Times that the government could ask the US-headquartered company to reduce the resolution of images of sensitive locations or even blur the details. “This is something that’s technically feasible, something that Google has done for the US government,” said Rao.

Google has never reduced the resolution of Google Earth images, not “for the US government” nor for anyone else, and media reports that this is the case are due to the fact that reporters do not understand how Google Earth acquires its data. Every update of the data has brought increases in resolution, not reductions.

The other interviewed person is far more sanguine and aware of the broader issues, it appears:

V.S. Ramamurthy, secretary, Science and Technology Department, was non-committal. He said the expert group would look into all related issues. […] “The group will also study what other countries have done,” said Ramamurthy.

And if the group does that, it will see that other countries have done precisely nothing — not Australia, not the Netherlands, not the US, not Israel, not Korea, not China (as per this comment), not Pakistan, not Thailand and not Russia.

In what is quite an auspicious start to 2006 for wonderful things being done with Google Earth, Germany’s Bernhard Sterzbach today came out with a beta of his Globe Glider, which brings the holy grail of integrating Google Earth with the web browser a whole lot closer.

Globe Glider is a dynamic network link, but on steroids. Its main innovation is much tighter integration between Google Earth and its built-in browser — installation requires you to allow Google Earth to be scriptable, a setting that gets changed in the Windows registry (see setup instructions).

Once Globe Glider is up and running, the browser window shows all manner of relevant information about the current view in Google Earth, and it updates automatically. (I got some errors, but that’s probably because I don’t have ActiveX installed, as I used Virtual PC for the Mac to check this).

I especially like the built-in GeoURL tab, which updates to show you nearby GeoURL entries in the browser. Same goes for a list of links to nearby places, with Google Earth’s view moving to these places if you click on the links. We have two-way communication between browser and Earth, then, and that’s a wonderful thing to see. (Other tabs point to Answers.com, destination guides and also nearby hotels, so there looks to be a referral-based business model behind all this.)