UNOSAT has just released a map dated January 9 that contains satellite imagery of Gaza City acquired by the WorldView-1 Satellite on January 6. The imagery has been used by UNOSAT to create a damage assessment overview of Gaza City.

I’ve added that map to the Gaza maps network link for Google Earth, which in the meantime also contains the updated OCHA Gaza situation map, dated January 8. (If you have already downloaded it before, just refresh it in Google Earth.)

By using the opacity slider in Google Earth you can compare the imagery from January 6 to the base imagery on Google Earth, acquired by DigitalGlobe on June 14, 2007. Both maps show individual houses and paths, so it is useful for people familiar with Gaza City to assess the situation on the ground.

(Note: I converted the latest UNOSAT map to a JPEG at full resolution, so it clocks in at 2.9MB; please wait a moment for it to download. Again, I’m wishing these maps were released as KML overlays with KML placemarks, but in their absence of such maps this is the best we can do.)

In related news, Mikel Maron reports that the OpenStreetMap Gaza project is progressing well.

PS: I have yet to hear from the self-appointed watchers of alleged pro-Palestinian bias in Google Earth that Google’s drawing of Gaza’s border with Israel is inaccurate. Perhaps this is because the error is in Israel’s favor this time?

When I was a kid my cousins and I would spend summers at a farm in the Belgian Ardennes, where we’d get very creative at getting up to no good. We’d go exploring all over the place, and sometimes, mostly where fields become forests, we’d find old expended bullets or even, on one occasion, a partial helmet. We would bring them home and then my father would explain about World War II, and how the fields around us saw some fierce and desperate fighting in the winter of 1944-45, during the Battle of the Bulge.

That was around 1977, when I was 8 and the war was “only” 32 years past. We’re exactly twice as far removed today, in terms of time, from the end of World War II, which is a strange and sobering thought, because those fields today look exactly the same as they did when I was a child. But they certainly wouldn’t have in 1945.

All this I remembered when a few weeks ago Free Geography Tools made me aware of a web page that has recreations of famous historical battles available for download as KML files, complete with time-line progressions. The files are the final projects by US Naval Academy students in SO432, Datums, Map Projections, and MGRS Lab.

When I looked at the recreation of the Battle of the Bulge (a whopping 94MB KMZ file containing a series of digitized map overlays in Google Earth), I suddenly realized that my father hadn’t been talking in the abstract when he mentioned the fields around us. He meant it literally. On December 27-28, 1944, the Nazi incursion into Belgium reached its furthest point. The tide was turned, I now realize, precisely in those fields and woods where my cousins and I played so innocently in in the summers of the 70s, marked here by the white arrow:

That sure brings home the Battle of the Bulge for me. And thanks, by the way, if you were there.

Slowly but surely, operating systems are getting geosavvier, but if it isn’t happening fast enough for you, there are some tools to help you out. CDFinder, a $39 professional strength (as in “newsroom media library”) file cataloguing tool for the Mac, has had the ability to search for geotagged photos by coordinates since early 2008 (when it was blogged on Ogle Earth). Now CDFinder 5.5 has just been released, and it does a lot more in the geo-department. CDFinder’s developer Norbert M. Doerner writes:

I have now released CDFinder 5.5. Here is a list of the GPS related new features:

• The new GeoFinder dramatically improves the Geo-Search feature: A fully interactive map allows you to specify the starting point for your search, and you can use the current Google Earth position, along with preset locations and a new place search
• CDFinder can now export geotags into the KMZ format, including previews of the actual photos and important metadata, such as the location and camera parameters. That does of course work for any photo format
• All photos with GPS data now have the GeoIcon badged to their thumbnail in the CDFinder windows
• CDFinder can upload your geotagged photos to www.locr.com! Simply context click on any photo with a GeoTag, and use the context menu to start the upload dialog
• When cataloging GPS data, CDFinder now also reads the azimuth, tilt, and distance values written by Graphic Converter and some GPS modules attached to Nikon cameras. This value is then used for “Reveal in Google Earth”, as well as the KMZ export file
• The GPS location data of a photo can now copied to the clipboard, using the context menu
• Added SmugMug, WikiMapia, Yahoo Maps, Geoudy, OpenStreetMap, and Woohpy to the GPS menu

I am very happy that Apple has finally seen the light about getagging as well, that means that the whole thing is moving towards mainstream, that can only be positive…

Here is a screenshot of CDFinder’s GeoFinder in action:

Of course, this kind of search becomes useful once you have a lot of georeferenced photos. Here’s how the “Export as KMZ” function works for a group of selected photos:

I gave it a go with some recently georeferenced photos. The resulting KML is basic but functional and works fine as way of quickly getting the photos on a map. (I saved the KMZ file to my Dropbox public folder, and made a network link to it and also saved that to the DropBox folder. Here it is as KML and here it is as a Google Map.)

If exporting photos to KML files is your main aim, you should also take a look at the recently updated $30 Mac geocoding app HoudahGeo 2, which offers the same export ability. It has more options upon export, though the resulting file is also quite basic.

CDFInder and HoudahGeo are different and complementary beasts, however: HoudahGeo does geocoding, reverse geocoding and exports to Flickr; CDFinder helps you navigate your metadata. Since both HoudahGeo and CDFinder come as free demos, do try them both.

Meanwhile, I’m still looking for a good style editor for KML. Or even a bad one:-)

Perhaps you’ve read about the spate of confirmed cases of the avian flu virus being transmitted to humans this past month, in Egypt, India, Vietnam and China, with the H5N1 virus claiming several lives after a period of inactivity.

One reason is that the northern winter always sees an increase in influenza activities of all kinds, according to medical researchers. But today’s big health story is about the release of a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder showing that “the resistance of the avian flu virus to a major class of antiviral drugs is increasing through positive evolutionary selection, with researchers documenting the trend in more than 30 percent of the samples tested.”

The study comes with a phylogenetic visualization of the avian flu virus for Google Earth. That’s not surprising, because the lead study author is Andrew Hill, whom Ogle Earth originally blogged way back in 2006, when he first experimented with KML phylogenetic trees, and again in 2007, when Andrew first published his phylogenetic visualization technique.

Here’s how the press release describes today’s KML file:

The research team used an interactive “supermap” using Google Earth technology that portrays the individual gene mutations and spread of the avian flu around the globe, said Guralnick of CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. By projecting genetic and geographic information onto the interactive globe, users can “fly” around the planet to see where resistant H5N1 strains are occurring, said Guralnick, also Hill’s doctoral adviser.

The KMZ file is available online here, so you too can take a look. It’s not just pretty lines: Each node/placemark on the ground corresponds to an actual case (animal or human), and its popup contains data that describe the strain’s resistance at that point, as well as links to the nodes of related strains — click on those and Google Earth will fly you there. By letting you travel along the nodes in this fashion, this phylogenetic tree lets you see the evolution of the virus over time (the vertical dimension) as it travels (the horizontal dimensions.)

One immediate observation: In densely populated areas such as cities, you see the virus evolving rapidly into a succession of related strains. At this scale, exact georeferencing would just confuse (and is likely unavailable) so it is much better to arrange the nodes in a circle, giving prominence to the ancestral relationships between nodes. Very neat.

Inner Hypostyle Hall, Temple Of Seti 1, Abydos, Egypt

360Cities today rolled out an embedding tool for its panoramas. This is a big deal: Before, you couldn’t just upload a panorama to a server via FTP and expect it to show up properly on a web page, like you would with a normal photo. You first had to chop the image into tiles; you also had to upload a player to the server, usually Flash-based, and then tweak it via arcane parameters or custom-made Javascript.

Now, just upload your panorama to you account at 360Cities. Not only will it show up in on the 360Cities website and on Google Earth — as of today you can also embed it on any web page you can edit, just like you would with a YouTube video.

There’s more: Because each panorama can be oriented in addition to georeferenced, you can travel between panoramas using the on-screen hotspots, with some neat transition animations that let you keep your bearings (literally:-). And if you click through to the full-screen view or a panorama’s home page, a little Google Map in the bottom left of the screen shows you in which direction you’re looking and your field of view. You can even drag the field of view to quickly look around.

The full screen option is definitely my favorite feature, for its immersive feel; but for a real mind trip right-click on a panorama and play with some of the available alternate views, such as Little Planet View or Architectural View.

And let’s not forget to send kudos to the viewing engine used by 360Cities, krpano, whose multi-resolution rendering of a panorama depending on zoom levels taps the same efficiencies as the image pyramids used by Google Maps and Microsoft Sea Dragon.

Mannaminne View

• Cassini at Saturn Interactive Explorer: CASSIE is a wonderful 3D interactive application by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that lets you visualize all of Cassini’s flybys of Saturn and its moons. It’s web-based, with plugins for Macs and Windows, and it looks delicious. It’s the sort of stuff I wish I had when I was a kid.
• iCool ’09: iPhoto ’09 appears to have implemented the georeferencing of photos — and then viewing them via geographic criteria — quite superbly, judging from the tutorial video. One thing that stood out for me is that when you are defining a new place to tag a photo with, you can define the area it is supposed to cover by adjusting the size of a circle around the placemark. No more pins named “Canada”, yay!

  Another cool feature, hinted at in this screenshot: Smart albums for photos based on your current field of view. My new regret: Apple’s pro Aperture photo app doesn’t have all these geotools. I wish iPhoto ’09 were usable as a browsing interface for my existing Aperture photo collections. Perhaps it is?

• iFool ’09: Nooooo. iMovie ’09‘s animated travel maps don’t get you from A to B via great circle routes, but pretend the Earth is flat. Fail, Apple. At least let great circle routes be an option.
• Google Earth Enterprise goes portable: The Official Google Enterprise Blog has the announcement, and All Points Blog has the clarifications about Google Earth Enterprise Portable: Yes, disaster relief and humanitarian organizations can now take all or some of their globe data into the field, stored on an external USB disk and served from the laptop itself. No, it doesn’t mean you can take Google Earth’s base imagery with you into the field; you need to already have your own datasets on a Google Earth Enterprise system.
• Edge Question: It’s that time of the year where Edge asks science luminaries one questions. This year: “What will change everything?” Garrett Lisi predicts, among other things, that in the future “Every physical location will be geo-tagged with an overlay of information.”
• Second Earth 2.0: NOAA’s Eric Hackathorn builds an ever-better virtual virtual globe, in Second Life:

  (Earlier blog entry) (Via Architecture +)

• Astronomical Object finder: Star Finder is simple yet clever. Search for an object (seriously, any object), get the view in Google Sky (web). For example, searching for UGC7777 produces a lovely colliding galaxy system. I only wish we’d get a quick KML link to the view in the standalone Google Sky.

UNOSAT has released an updated version of its Gaza situation map, while OCHA (the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) has also released a map focusing on the humanitarian situation. Both maps incorporate information from as recently as yesterday, January 5, 2009.

I’ve now also geopositioned the OCHA map. Additionally, I’ve put both overlays into a nested network link and moved all the content to my Dropbox (putting this Ogle Earth post to good use).

Here is the result, a single URL that automatically shows the latest versions of both maps. Remember to play with the opacity slider in Google Earth.

Should there be further updates to these maps (or other new useful maps made available) then I will simply replace the files via Dropbox and update the KML file. Your network link in Google will automatically show the latest file, without you needing to download it again — either just relaunch Google Earth, or right-click on the folder icon and select “Refresh”.

As Aid Worker Daily has shown, online maps of Gaza are sub-par at the moment, though you can help OpenStreetMap build a better map of Gaza right now — Mikel Maron is asking for help. Google’s Ed Parsons lends his support to Mikel’s OSM Gaza effort, in part because Google’s own Map Maker crowdsourcing tool isn’t enabled for Gaza. Yet another reason why it is important to have OSM around.

Google Map Maker Fail

(Note: Overlays of the OCHA and UNOSAT maps are clearly a stopgap method of getting information across — it would be more efficient to have map contents available as KML vector objects, constantly updated as this conflict progresses. One proof of concept is the Google Map showing the progress of ABC News correspondent N.J. Burkett as he covers the conflict (via Google Maps Mania). I’m not going to add the KML for that map to the network link of reference maps, but it is an example of what’s possible. If anyone knows of such updated content about the humanitarian situation or the progress of the war, please let me know and I will add it. Also let me know if you find other maps to overlay.)