• O’Reilly Radar has highlights from the keynotes.
• GeoServer 1.7.0 will make its geocontent automatically crawlable by Google’s crawler
• All Points Blog ranks company announcements according to their potential impact.
• Google Earth Blog covers John Hanke’s presentation.

If I detect a trend it’s a good one: Google and Yahoo are both opening up access to their geodatabases. Dan Catt’s been explaining how you can now query Yahoo’s database for a landmark or location and get all manner of related geodata back. (James Fee likes it.) John Hanke’s announcement doesn’t sweat the details, but more news about Google’s GeoSearch API is apparently forthcoming soon.

ISIS (a nuclear-non proliferation watchdog that has already been much sourced on Ogle Earth) has just released a detailed report on the alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria bombed by Israel in September 2007. If like me you can’t get enough of the way in which civilians have had a front-row seat for seeing the available evidence analysed, then this report is well worth a read.

The report contains an interesting revelation: Unlike previous media reports that the site had been under satellite surveillance since 2001, it now appears that it wasn’t discovered until 2005, and that its purpose was a mystery until 2007, when Israel presented the CIA with evidence we recently saw in the CIA video presentation. Nut graphs:

According to U.S. government experts, U.S. intelligence had determined in 2005 that Syria and North Korea were involved in a project in the province Dayr az Zawr. However, the nature of the cooperation and the location of the site remained unknown. However, suspicions based on earlier obtained information, pointed to some type of nuclear activity taking place in this province.

The 2005 assessment led to an intensified imagery search, which resulted in the discovery of a large unidentified building near the town of Al Kibar. According to a U.S. government expert, it was “odd and in the middle of nowhere,” but analysts could not ascribe the building with a nuclear character, and U.S. intelligence labeled it an “enigma facility.” In the spring of 2007, the building was determined to be the covert nuclear reactor based on photos acquired by U.S. intelligence, reportedly from Israel, that showed the inside and outside of the building. […]

Because of its late detection of the Al Kibar reactor, Israel felt compelled to strike the site militarily.

What’s interesting is that given the late discovery of this building, it would have been entirely possible for a Google Earth user to have found the unusual construction first and annotated it in Google Earth Community, were it not for the fact that Google Earth’s imagery of the region happened to be low resolution until late 2007.

It’s been a few months since the more paranoid elements in India’s government have acted regarding Google’s mapping services, so it’s about time that we get another volley, this time aimed at sites that use the Google Maps API, like Wikimapia. An article by India’s Times Now manages to get this news across, together with some hilarious mixed metaphors:

The government is worried over several websites that give detailed, high resolution images of some of the country’s top secret nuclear installations. In a country that has suffered series of terror attacks, high resolution pictures of sensitive installations on the website implies a glaring security loophole, which cannot be ignored. In a bid to unplug the security loophole, various ministries are likely to meet with intelligence agencies on Tuesday (May 13).

[…] For example, the website — www.wikimapia.com — gives you a high resolution bird’s-eye-view of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) — and on clicking zoom in, you can see everything right from the nuclear reactor to the radiological laboratory.

Pakistan’s Daily Times, reporting the same news, seems to be under the impression that while Google Earth has censored some imagery of India as a result of requests by India’s government, sites like Wikimapia are taking Google’s place by continuing to make sensitive information available. This is wrong on two counts. Google has not degraded any imagery over India (that false meme borne from wishful thinking in India’s media was debunked back in 2006), and since wikimapia.com uses the Google Maps API, it has the exact same base layer as Google Earth.

The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is indeed annotated in Wikimapia, but it’s also immediately visible by doing a search for it in Google Earth. With the results of crowdsourced intelligence gathering now being distributed across multiple sites (not just Google Earth Community anymore) it is high time that India’s security services learn to operate under the assumption that there are satellites watching overhead (just like everybody else’s security services do) rather than futilely trying to constrain information already out in the public domain.

Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope (“Spring Beta”) has just launched and is available for download for Windows XP and Vista. I was able to take it for a quick spin on a very underpowered system before it crashed but even so it left a truly stunning impression. This is an amazing tool. If you have a well-specced Windows machine (not Parallels or VMWare on the Mac like me) then drop everything and lose yourself in this for the next few hours.

Compared to Google Sky, you can really see the advantage of a building a dedicated astronomical browsing tool. I have to agree with Scoble (much as I hate to :-) — this is easily the most impressive thing I’ve seen Microsoft do in a long time, and it stands head and shoulders above the competition. It may even force me to go back and reinstall Windows on my Mac via Boot Camp, because I suspect that’s the only way I am going to get to use this application. (Thanks Jonathan for the heads up)

What use is all that fancy 3D building stuff in Google Earth? Well, for one, it can help you find out if you are in the line of site of a particular geostationary television satellite. DishPointer.com has just created a really innovative use of Google Earth’s increasingly accurate rendering of urban cityscapes: Not only will the site calculate the direction you need to point your dish at to catch a certain satellite from your location on Earth, it will now also draw the line of sight for you in Google Earth, and show you if it cuts through nearby buildings (in which case you’d be out of luck).

Here’s how it works: Enter your address on DishPointer.com and choose a satellite. You get back a Google Map with the relevant dish setup data.

(Move the marker to fine-tune.) But Google Maps can’t show you 3D buildings, which is why just below the map you can now open the view in Google Earth. The resulting KML file draws the exact line of sight from your location to the satellite.

As you can see above, in case you wanted set up a satellite dish beside Trinity Church on Wall Street, you’d be out of luck.

You can zoom out all the way until you see the satellite yourself.

My one big feature request: I’d like to be able to set the height above ground that my dish finds itself at. Many dishes are are not at ground level but on the roof of an apartment complex, and this matters in line-of-sight calculations. Still, Dishpointer.com’s use of Google Earth is a really novel idea.

• New Rumsey Historical Maps: 100 historical maps from David Rumsey’s collection have been added to Google Earth as overlays, for a grand total of 120 maps. The collections is now also more manageable — click on icons on the globe to download your overlay of choice. There are some truly fantastic maps in this layer, including some of Egypt — but the color scheme of the popup windows makes the text almost illegible (on a Mac).
• Where 2.0 preännouncements: All Points Blog gives us a preview of what companies will be announcing at Where 2.0. EveryScape is really worth watching out for.
• South Africa tourist layer: South Africa’s tourist commission releases a polished KML collection of tourist sites, including stadiums for the 2010 World Cup. I suspect this layer will soon find its way into Google Earth’s default Travel and Tourism layer — it’s a lot better than Egypt’s effort.
• Using Second Life for Cityscapes: Fresh from his planetarium-building spree in Second Life, Swedish SL programming virtuoso Magnus Zeisig is now setting his sites on using SL to mimic historical cityscapes. A Swedish museum is interested in exhibiting such cityscapes in a virtual world, so Magnus has made an extensive study (PDF) of what is out there in SL right now in terms of cities, appended with some of his thoughts. Not surprisingly, he’s found that computer algorithms for building cityscapes are more realistic-looking than manual builds.

The Daily Telegraph has another “scoop”:

China has secretly built a major underground nuclear submarine base that could threaten Asian countries and challenge American power in the region, it can be disclosed. […]

The images were obtained by Janes Intelligence Review after the periodical was given access to imagery from the commercial satellite company DigitalGlobe. (My italics)

The main problem with this article is that the underground submarine base has been visible on Google Earth since at least August 2006, when it was mentioned on Ogle Earth. The article misrepresents what is new information. Jane’s Defense Weekly has indeed commissioned a new image of the base from Digital Globe, much like we all could if we have a few thousand USDs to spare, and not surprisingly the imagery shows the submarine base being used by, wait for it, submarines.

Click to enlarge

It’s always good to get access to updated imagery, and JDW’s commissioned imagery is from February 28, 2008, vs Google Earth’s from January 14, 2006. Comparing the two, you can indeed see that land access tunnels that were under construction in 2006 have now been completed.

However, when newspapers pretend they are at the forefront of intelligence gathering when in fact they are the laggards, is it any wonder they’re being subsumed by the web?

In a related matter, the question of Chinese sensitivity to having its military “secrets” splayed out on the web is now becoming increasingly relevant. I have already linked to the AFP article indicating a new harder line on maps the Chinese government does not approve of, but the issue is worth revisiting in detail. This is the first time Google is specifically named in an investigation, along with its Chinese search competitors Baidu and Sohu.

There are two separate issues: One is maps that show borders and labels which do not represent China’s official position — the disputed border with India, showing Taipei as a capital city, not showing the Spratleys and the Paracel Islands as Chinese… The other is satellite imagery of Chinese military bases or sensitive sites, along with user-generated content that meticulously identifies these features, such as on the Google-hosted Google Earth Community, whose annotated placemarks are automatically visible in Google Earth.

That both China and India should demand that Google Earth show their mutual border to their own liking is of course an absurdity, and one that is impossible to reconcile on one global map. But Google has a potential way out in China: It already has a local Chinese variant of Google Maps, and as a study from 2007 shows, the Chinese Google Maps does alter its borders with India to reflect Chinese sensibilities. As for avoiding showing satellite imagery of sensitive areas? Easy — the Chinese Google Maps shows no satellite imagery at all; the button is simply missing from the map.

This indicates that Google has preëmptively slaked China’s hunger for censorship in its local mapping product. There remains the question of Google Earth, however. Google is pushing Google Earth in China as an alternate means of following the Olympic torch around China. Does this mean that China’s censors will find fault with Google Earth? And what would the result of such official displeasure be?

Ars Technica suspects that there will be changes made to Google’s global mapping database, to satisfy China: “We wouldn’t be surprised to see some ‘alterations’ made to Google’s maps of China in the coming months.” Myself, I strongly suspect that this will not be the case. I could definitely see Google Earth being kept out of China by authorities via its great firewall, and that would be a loss for Chinese surfers but not for everyone else.

Instead, I expect Google to resist pressure from national governments — not just China but notably also India and Iran most recently — and instead to formulate clear policies as to how it will draw borders and label features. We’ve already seen Google’s naming policy for water bodies published, with a promise of more such policies being published soon.

Of course, China could play hardball with Google. Because Google has an extensive presence on the ground in China, China’s government has all manner of judicial means to pressure Google into changing its global map database. If it should ever go this far, I sincerely hope Google simply closes up shop in China and calls it a victory for free expression over censorship, even if the cost is high. Censoring Chinese citizens to satisfy local laws is one thing. Censoring the rest of the world to be allowed to do business in China would be a completely different matter.