Declan Butler, Paris-based reporter at Nature, is starting to blog more GIS-related topics. His latest post surveys all the different file formats out there for geographical data, and the conversion tools that have sprung up to bring existing information into Google Earth.

This reminds me above all that I need to re-categorize the past 6 months’ worth of posts on this blog into a far more useful system. Peppered over the past several months’ blogging are several more conversion tools, some of them websites, some of them scripts to make WMS servers accessible to Google Earth. I’m going to need a quiet afternoon this Christmas holidays to make that and other changes to this site. In the meantime, search is your friend.

Philip Holmstrand, who works at the City of Portland (makers of great mashups) contributed some suggestions to the Google Earth community bulletin board in a post entitled Two steps from becoming the next web browser!

What are the two features Google Earth is missing right now, according to Philip?

– The ability to link dynamically to a KML from within another KML, without using a browser as an intermediate step.

– The ability to manipulate navigation around the globe beyond just the loading phase. This could be done by giving us the ability to dynamically load/unload KML rather than just refreshing based on NetworkLinks

Re the first point: We can already link to an HTML URL from within Google Earth. We can link to a KML file from within an HTML browser. But what Philip wants is the ability to fetch and render KML files from links in KML files. Just like how we click in on HTML links in HTML documents to fetch new HTML documents, in fact.

One possible solution is to use a universal <a> tag (something which I discussed here.) These could be used in both HTML browsers and GIS browsers like Google Earth. That way, HTML snippets would be highly portable, as text containing such <a> tags would work in either browser, or depending on preferences.

ThinkLemon also has a review up of the Google Earth for Mac beta.

Meanwhile, a friend with a current model iMac on 1.5GB of RAM is reporting utterly smooth rendering, even with a large detail area and with anisotropic filtering turned to high in the preferences.

[Update 16.39 UTC: Google has asked very nicely that I take down references to sites where you can download the application.]

Coming Anarchy, the blog, finds another interesting border-related feature in Google Earth: Afghanistan is the only country to have its provinces separated by white lines.

An article in today’s Christian Science Monitor looks at what legal recourse countries might have should they feel sufficiently offended or exposed by Google Earth.

The article gives room to both sides of the debate. On the side of those who believe there might be a legal recourse for countries to constrain Google is Ram Jakhu, a professor of space law at McGill University in Montreal, who points to what the article calls “a 1986 UN resolution” which states that satellite photography “shall not be conducted in a manner detrimental to the legitimate rights and interests of the sensed State.” He concludes from this that “The US is under obligation to make sure these images are not being distributed in a manner other countries consider harmful,” according to the article.

The resolution in question is in fact a General Assembly resolution, Principles Relating to Remote Sensing of the Earth from Outer Space. General Assembly resolutions are not binding treaties, and hence easily neglected as a source of international law, which is why authors of GA resolutions tend to encode impossible objectives.

The Principles have suddenly become quite dated, reading them at the end of 2005, post-release of Google Earth. The language is clearly aimed at actors that are states, not private corporations or individuals. In 1986, the output from imaging satellites was primarily for state actors — the idea that individuals might one day consume such intelligence without state interference was clearly beyond imagining. Consider, for example Principle XI:

Remote sensing shall promote the protection of mankind from natural disasters. To this end, States participating in remote sensing activities that have identified processed data and analysed information in their possession that may be useful to States affected by natural disasters, or likely to be affected by impending natural disasters, shall transmit such data and information to States concerned as promptly as possible.

When it came to the Pakistan quake, this kind of “principle” proved wholly superseded by events. A private company (Google) made satellite imagery available from a private satellite imaging (Digital Globe) via a distributed network (the internet) to individuals and NGOs who then used the information to organize relief efforts. What state initiative there was involved Pakistan trying to hinder this dissemination of data.

MultiGen-Paradigm jumps on the KML bandwagon with version 3.1 of their Creator software.

This company is into making software tools for creating real-time 3D content. I don’t think an export function to KML in Creator is suddenly going to allow us to drive around in virtual cars on Google Earth, but it did lead me to think that it would be rather nice to have a physics model in Google Earth, one day maybe, so that we could fly around in it if we were so inclined. Or perhaps, slightly more realistically, tracking the International Space Station could soon be done using a real 3D model rather than a 2D icon. After all, if the resolution of some maps is down to decimeters, then an object the size of a bus could be represented faithfully.

Google Earth’s democratization of satellite imagery continues to inspire innovative uses. Just last week, a Swiss legislator proposed hunting for orange jumpsuits on satellite images of Europe to track down alleged secret CIA prisons. Google Earth comes tantalizingly close to helping along — half of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, mentioned in the Reuters article linked to above, is shown in high resolution (KML link), but no smoking gun here, I’m afraid. Still, if incriminating satellite images were to leak out, they’d be on Google Earth as overlays in no time at all, is my guess.

Elsewhere, Asiapundit links to a blogger who’s been exploring northern Laos with Google Earth, wondering if the extensive logging he sees there is legal.