Ogle Earth

links for 2009-11-04

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:06:04 +0000

Volcanic Rift in Ethiopian Desert Confirmed As Beginning of New Sea : TreeHugger

Researchers: Volcanic rift in Ethiopia is beginning of a new sea. Will be fun to follow this on GE

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links for 2009-11-03

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:04:27 +0000

All images for Oil Slick in the Timor Sea : Natural Hazards

Satellite images of the Timor Sea oil slick

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links for 2009-10-18

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:05:14 +0000

Tips on Garmin Custom Maps — GPS Visualizer Adds Garmin KMZ Support

GPS Visualizer Adds Garmin KMZ Support

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links for 2009-10-13

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:05:59 +0000

Google LatLong: Random Hacks of Kindness

Google's post on Random Hacks of Kindness "codejam", with neogeo angle. To be first of many
Random Hacks of Kindness

Random Hacks of Kindness disaster relief tech conf Nov 12: MSFT, GOOG, YHOO, World Bank & NASA-Ames sponsor
Mapping News by Mapperz

Demo of Bournemouth mapped in 3D with very high resolution lasers. Wow, but I hope it's scalable

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Garmin gets support for KML overlays — implications

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:51:11 +0000

Late last week Garmin came out with a beta update for its Colorado, Dakota and Oregon GPS devices that displays uploaded KMZ files containing geopositioned overlays. Garmin's announcement and instructions are here. This is the first time I am aware of that a mobile device renders KML overlays.

GPSTracklog covers the news, and has some usage tips. GPSFix has detailed instructions, tips on using GPS Visualizer's generated overlays, and an exhaustive list of tools and resources.

I happen to have an Garmin Oregon 300, and since I love it whenever a gadget I own gets better simply by aging, I did the (Windows only) upgrade and some testing myself this past weekend. The verdict:

Although it is beta, this is a very robust update — the KMZ overlay of satellite imagery from the likely underground nuclear processing plant in IRan blogged a few weeks ago works seamlessly. That's a 36 megapixel JPEG and a 16 megapixel JPEG in a 11MB combined KMZ file, into which I could zoom to see sub-meter objects! Screen refreshes are obviously not as rapid as on my MacBook Pro, but for a gadget meant to show a position in context it is plenty fast. I was expecting the file to completely bog down the Garmin, but the device didn't even blink.
Feed the Garmin a KMZ file with mixed KML-based objects, such as placemarks, polygons and overlays, and it wil ignore all the components except for the overlays. No complaining, no error messages. Just the overlays.

Some further thoughts:

In its instructions, Garmin writes in red ink:
However, please be responsible and only create a Garmin Custom Map from a map that is in the public domain, you hold the copyright in, or you have permission to use from the copyright holder.
I think that statement is a bit odd, and am not at all sure it is justifiable. I understand how the sharing or distribution of maps can require copyright permission, but that is the case for any map, online or offline, digital or paper. What I am having difficulty with in Garmin's statement is the attempt to parse a difference between owning a map and using a map. As far as I am concerned, owning a map but not being allowed to use it is a nonsensical demand.

To put it another way: Of course I should be able to scan a paper map I own, overlay it in Google Earth and import it into my Garmin. What's that got to do with the copyright owner?

Sharing the resulting file with an online community? Yes, that could require permission.

But it gets trickier: There are many, many thousands of map and imagery overlays accessible online as KMZ files. In all cases, they have been made available with the expectation that they be displayed on a screen attached to a computer. Until now, the application most likely doing the rendering will have been Google Earth (or possibly Google Maps, or Microsoft Bing), but that is by no means a limitation of the KML markup language. KML is an open standard, and any device is allowed to parse KML. Do any of these KMZ files come with the condition that they may only be viewed using some applications but not others, or may not be viewed in combination with other functionality, such as a GPS positioning function? I think not. So why would it be okay to view such files in Google Earth while running a GPS tracking tool, but not on a Garmin while running its GPS tracking function?
Why would anyone want to upload KMZ overlays to a Garmin in the first place? There is a very good reason, actually: No other portable device currently supports the display of KML overlays; Google Earth for the iPhone will likely get such support one day, but the iPhone is not an ideal GPS device, because it can only do one thing at a time, and tends to require a connection to the internet. If you're a nuclear weapons inspector headed for the hills outside Qum, this latest Garmin update is your friend.

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links for 2009-10-08

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:04:35 +0000

Google LatLong: Featured Map Makers: Faraz & Jabran

Faraz & Jabran, mappers of Pakistan, are making a bigger difference than they imagine
Sometimes Larry And Sergey Don't Tell Eric Schmidt About Google's Acquisitions Till Later (GOOG)

CEO Schmidt: Google bought Keyhole for "a few million", he found out after the fact

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links for 2009-10-07

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:02:54 +0000

Albatross-mounted cameras? Yes, we have arrived at the future

Animal-powered sensor webs, anyone?

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Belgium again thinking of censoring aerial, satellite imagery?

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:41:48 +0000

This past Sunday, De Zondag — a Flemish weekend magazine that mostly concerns itself with fashion trends and the lives of soap opera stars — had a curious and tendentious short item entitled "[Belgian] Defense Ministry investigates Google Earth". The magazine doesn't even have a proper website, but here is the relevant PDF page, and a translation:

Defense Ministry investigates Google Earth

BRUSSELS — The [Belgian] Defense Ministry is investigating whether Google Earth — the internet application with which you can see the whole world close up through satellite images — forms a threat to security.

Google Earth — which anyone can consult via the internet — brings ever sharper images of the world into the living room, and not everyone is happy with that. Terrorists interrogated by US authorities have already admitted consulting Google Earth in their preparations for attacks. Burglars all over the world are apparently using it to explore the houses they want to rob. And then there are the military institutions that aren't happy that anyone can just see military bases. In the Netherlands and in the US such places have already been made invisible on Google Earth upon request of the authorities. In Belgium you can currently still explore everything in our country. At the suggestion of the Defense Ministry, a working group has been set up to "develop a structural and global solution to the problem that certain imagery such as that in Google Earth can pose for security." The Defense Ministry says that the results [of the working group] will be presented shortly.

I found it via a re-reporting in English on Expatica, but lacking any context, and considering the reputation of De Zondag, I let it go.

But then fellow Belgian Henri Willox, who is currently living and tweeting amid "interesting times" in Conakry, Guinea, listed a series of pick-ups of the story in mainstream Belgian and Dutch media, including one of Belgium's biggest papers, Belgium's national press agency, all of them uncritically parrotting the copy of the original. That's when a story like this becomes important, because if left uncorrected, its mistaken assumptions will become received wisdom, both among casual readers and among policymakers. It also contains a dangerous idea.

But first — I am still not convinced that De Zondag has a proper story. It doesn't look like a leak (if it were, why leak it to De Zondag?) nor was the information first disseminated via a press release or via the national press agency Belga, as the Belgian Defense Ministry tends to do.

But let us assume that it is a real story. It would be another sorry chapter in Belgium's paranoid official stance towards Google Earth. It began innocently enough in May 2006, when the Defense Ministry issued a statement in which it said it was "not afraid" of the imagery, and that in any case it had been commercially available for years. But then during 2006 Google Earth received more and better quality satellite imagery of Belgium, and then the tune changed: In September 2006 the Belgian military said that yes, actually, it would like to censor its bases after all. But how? Belgium's senate intelligence oversight committee decided that month to take a look at the legal options, and to report back. (Its own intelligence on Google Earth didn't seem to be all that good, BTW.) One of the members of the committee was even interviewed by Belgeoblog on the matter. And that was the last of it. If there was a report, it was never publicized. Unlike in the Netherlands, there is no law on the books in Belgium allowing government censorship of aerial imagery before its release into the public domain. (Neither Belgium nor the Netherlands claim jurisdiction over space, so satellite imagery is always immune form such interference.)

In August 2009, Belgium got a remarkable imagery upgrade, from satellite imagery to aerial imagery, taken in April 2007 by the same company that took the Dutch imagery, which was censored by the Dutch government before being released to the public. Might the De Zondag story be a reaction in the Belgian military to this development? It's possible; Belgian military bases are certainly clearer than ever. But if that is a problem, it is something that needs to be fixed between the Belgian government and the aerial imagery providers operating in its airspace. Google just buys the resulting available imagery.

In other words:

In the Netherlands and in the US such places have already been made invisible on Google Earth upon request of the authorities.

Wrong: In both cases, aerial imagery was censored before it was released to the public domain. What else is wrong in the article?

Terrorists interrogated by US authorities have already admitted consulting Google Earth in their preparations for attacks.

If the article had said "Indian authorities", it would have been correct. Those same terrorists also used mobile phones and credit cards, however. Is it so surprising that everyone uses these tools for both good and evil? The mention of burglars is similarly hyperbolic.

But the part of that article that worries me is the mention of developing a "structural and global solution" allowing the censorship of tools like Google Earth. I hope that by "global", Belgian lawmakers merely mean "thorough". But it could also mean that they think it would be a good idea to change international law, extending the ability of national governments to censor imagery of their respective territories taken by satellite imagery providers. Such an initiative was already mooted once by the Indian government, and no doubt despotic regimes everywhere would sign up for it if given half a chance.

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links for 2009-10-06

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:05:30 +0000

Crisis Mapping 2009 - The First International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM)

Crisis Mapping 2009 - The First International Conference on Crisis Mapping: Oct 16-18 in Cleveland

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links for 2009-09-30

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:05:12 +0000

IEEE Spectrum: DIY Street-View Camera

DIY automated Street View setup with off-the-shelf components:

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Qum nuclear site redux: Original-resolution images now published to Google Earth

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:36:59 +0000

Earlier today I asked ISIS if I could overlay in Google Earth the high-resolution original of the GeoEye image taken on September 26 showing what is likely the underground nuclear fuel processing plant being built near Qum in Iran. Soon after, my inbox brimmed not just with the original image file from September 26, but also with the DigitalGlobe image from January 2009. (See previous Ogle Earth story for context.)

The September 26 GeoEye image is a massive 6,000x6,000 pixel tile covering 9 square kilometers at 50cm per pixel. The January 2009 DigitalGlobe image clocks in at almost 4,000x4,000 pixels and 60cm per pixel. They've now been overlaid in Google Earth and are available as a 11MB KMZ file.

The images haven't been orthorectified, so I've aligned them as much as possible on the flat features of the plain. This means that higher ground diverges between the two images and Google Earth's base image (from March 25, 2005).

With these original-resolution versions, there is much delicious detail to explore — vents, depots, trails, towers, and a whole new hamlet to boot. Go crazy:-) (Remember, the opacity slider in the sidebar is your friend. Select the layer in the sidebar, and start sliding.)

Perhaps this is also a good moment to step back in awe at what modern technology has wrought — the ability for any sufficiently concerned citizen or organization to scrutinize any desired spot on Earth within hours of making the request, and then being able to publish the result to a context-rich virtual globe that is universally available. That's a profound shift in favor of accountability, transparency and democracy. Monitoring the planet has been crowdsourced.

Case in point: In response to my throw-away line in the last post about how "intelligence services are right now trying to calculate the volume of the excavated mound ... to estimate the minimum size of the excavated space", "Blowback" pointed me to a comment thread on the very public Arms Control Wonk site where this calculation has already been tackled. Blowback's own contribution is resplendent with the kind of geeky detail that I can only marvel at, so here it is in full, with permission:

Looking at the early spoil heap (2005), the area of the top is ~9,500 sqm while the area of the bottom is ~14,500 sqm. Assuming a 45deg slope, the maximum depth (at northern tip) is ~14m while the minimum depth (southern edge) is 4m. Simplifying this gives an average area of 12,000 sqm and a average depth of 9m so the volume of the early spoil heap is ~110,000 cubic metres. I would guess that the new pile is about 4 times the early pile, so the total volume would be 550,000 cubic metres. With your expansion factor of 1.4, that means the tunnel volume is ~400,000 cubic metres. For reference, the two huts are about 1000 sqm each.

It is most likely that the underground structure consists of a roadway and a large chamber(s). If we assume that the first excavation was a roadway to reach the chamber and they were using say Terex TA40 articulated tippers, then the roadway would need to be 6m high by 10m wide giving a spoil volume of 60 cubic metres per linear metre, so the spoil volume of 110,000 which equates to a solid rock volume of 78,000 cubic metres translates to a roadway length of 1300 metres. As for the chamber, the volume of spoil is ~440,000 cubic metres which would result from ~320,000 cubic metres of solid rock. So at a height of 6m, this would give a floor area of over 50,000 sqm. Quite big!

Blowback, who has a civil engineering background, explains some of his assumptions:

The expansion factor is to allow for the increase in volume that occurs when you dig rock out of the ground. The size of the roadway is determined by twice the size of the tipper truck used to haul muck out of the tunnel - you want two trucks to be able to pass each other at any point in the tunnel otherwise you radically slow the tunnelling rate. I picked the Terax TA40 because that is typical of the tipper trucks used in driving roadways in tunnelling - too small a truck and it takes too long, too large a truck and you have to haul too much muck. There is a lot of estimation in my rough calculations but the results are probably right in terms of order of magnitude so when I say the access tunnel length is 1300 metres, then the probability that it is between 1 and 2 km is high, but it is pretty unlikely to be 10kms and very unlikely to be 20kms. If you spot any mistakes in my calculations, please let me know.

How did I ever survive before the Internet?

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Adding the time-dimension to panoramas

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:23:37 +0000

It's been quiet here on Ogle Earth (unless there is a neogeopolitical emergency to tend to) because the past month has been crunch time to get a new site out the door: The website of the Swedish Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010, or at least v1.0 of it, which launches today.

The site's got lots of bright colors and the default page is in Chinese, because it is aimed shamelessly at the almost 400 million Chinese who have gone online, around 90% of whom have never been on an English language site. (Don't worry, almost all of the site is also available in English.)

The website is not about neogeography, but it is very much about a specific place and time. I can justify plugging it here on Ogle Earth because it also comes with an interesting proof of concept about recreating a sense of place that perhaps one day we'll see in Street View: A time-series of panoramas taken from the exact same location — in our case, right next to the Swedish pavilion, as it is being built. (Find it on the home page, and go straight for the full-screen view. Move the red Dalecarlian horse to and fro to see progress in the construction.)

Just as Google Earth's satellite imagery became immensely more useful when the addition of historical imagery gave us the time dimension to play with, so too Street View would benefit when in a few years' time multiple passes will have been made of the same roads. One challenge with such panoramas: Finding the exact same vantage point, so you can maintain the illusion of moving in time without moving perspective. That will likely not be easy to scale, considering that Street View cars can't always choose their lane and that GPS is not that accurate.

But three years from now, I'd be surprised if we didn't have viable 3D urban reconstructions from point clouds generated automatically out of successive Street Views. (Previously blogged proofs of concept include EarthMine and Photosynth.) In that kind of environment, the precise locations of panoramas in successive passes are no longer important, as the contents will all be mapped to a common evolving 3D surface anyway. Moving the time slider will let you see how the cityscape evolves, with both surface imagery and volumes progressing over time.

It's something of a pity that such technology will arrive about a decade too late to document the immense pace of change here in Shanghai as neighborhoods are converted wholesale from row houses to skyscrapers.

But at least we've got the Swedish pavilion covered:-)

Related: I've previously written up my working notes on the different ways of marketing a place online (and the comments are worth reading too). I still need to implement many of these. One thing I think will be worth investigating is to see if it is possible to use the timeline feature Google Earth with a time-series of spherical panoramas as rendered in KML. But that's a project for things get a little less crazy around here.

Unrelated but interesting: Notice how there is no way to comment on swedenexpo.cn? That's because if you want a license to operate a website in China with user-generated content, you also have to hire a censor, and that is not politically possible for us (not to mention undesirable). We've found a solution, however — outsourcing the commenting (and censoring) to a slew of popular Chinese social networking sites. For those of you outside the Great Chinese Firewall (or with a VPN) There is the Facebook fan page and the Twitter feed.

Further examples: There are two other examples I've been made aware of where panoramas are linked together in a time series: A demo by Hans Nyberg and one of a spot on the Belgian coast. Any further examples are welcome.

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links for 2009-09-27

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:04:03 +0000

esp@cenet — Bibliographic data

Google patent application for using panoramic images in driving directions (thanks Mike!)

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Updated: Iran nuclear site candidate satellite images from 2009, now overlaid in Google Earth

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:32:08 +0000

During the North American day yesterday ISIS chimed in with its best guess (PDF) for where Iran's newly declared underground nuclear fuel enrichment plant is situated — two guesses, in fact.

One of them is the same as the location identified in the previous post here on Ogle Earth as a likely candidate for the site. But ISIS also identifies another possible location further to the east.

ISIS has the benefit of very recent imagery it commissioned, taken by DigitalGlobe — August 2009 for the already-identified candidate, and January 2009 for the new candidate. The new candidate in particular shows much development work in the intervening four years between when the base imagery in Google Earth was taken and the DigitalGlobe imagery acquired in 2009.

2009:

2005:

The other candidate, to the west, shows little outward change in the intervening four years. Based on the 2009 imagery, my inexpert opinion now favors the new candidate identified by ISIS.

ISIS's findings are in PDF format, so I took the images therein and positioned them as overlays in Google Earth. Here they are available as a KMZ download. Play with the opacity slider in the sidebar to switch between 2009 and 2005.

[Update 18:01 UTC 2009-09-28: ISIS has now also published a brand new image of the site pictured above, commissioned from GeoEye on September 26 2009. The KMZ file linked to above has been updated to include this second image. The resolution is a bit lower than the DigitalGlobe image taken in January 2009, but there is clear progress visible in the construction site during the intervening 8 months — both tunnel entrances are now being covered up with earth. I suspect intelligence services are right now trying to calculate the volume of the excavated mound right in front of the tunnels as a way of estimating the minimum size of the excavated space inside the mountain.]

[Update 11:42 UTC 2009-09-29: KMZ file is now updated with two closeups from the Sept 26 GeoEye image, via this CNET article, attributing IHS Jane's analysis.]

[Update 2009-09-39: New post: Qum nuclear site redux: Original-resolution images now published to Google Earth]

(Note: Because the imagery is of hilly terrain and taken from a different position in the sky, it is not perfectly alignable with the base imagery.)

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Hunting for Iran's secret nuclear plant near Qum on Google Earth

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:52:33 +0000

(Read an update to this post, featuring imagery from 2009)

Iran's nuclear program is again making the news cycles after the country admitted this week that it has built a second nuclear fuel processing plant, to complement the one at Natanz.

According to the New York Times, the admission by Iran came after it learned that western intelligence agencies knew of its existence, and indeed the US, UK and French leaders were just now on TV to accuse Iran of having concealed the plant from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for all the years it was under construction.

The New York Times has US government sources situating the new plant "inside a mountain near the ancient city of Qum," and that alas is the most detail we can glean right now from public news sources.

Might it be enough to find this new plant in Google Earth, however? Not with certainty, but one place in particular looks like a very strong candidate. I'll explain how I found it, you decide how likely it is to be the right place.

First, I turned on successive years of the "Digital Globe Coverage" layer in the "More" directory in the "Layers" sidebar of Google Earth, and went exploring around Qum (aka Qom).

The working assumption is that any satellite image tile taken all by itself as a "special request", instead of as part of a long strip, tends to be taken at the behest of an organization that has good cause to investigate that region for something it might not have direct access to. This need not be an intelligence agency, it could also be an NGO, for example one that is interested in proliferation issues like ISIS:

With this search criteria in mind, two areas around Qum are found to be consistently the beneficiaries of such special requests. One of them is an Iranian missile test site some 40km ESE of Qum, and it is not near a mountain. The other one?

Well, it's a mountain 35km NNW of Qum. And it has two big parallel roads driving straight into it:

Considering that one-ended tunnels are rare finds, and after a look around Qum to see if there might be other overlooked sites, this candidate site sure looks promising.

Here is the placemark for the location, with a bonus pointer to the missile testing site. Enjoy.

(One weird additional piece of information: The imagery all the way around the mountain is dated August 21, 2005, but the area immediately around the entrance of the tunnel comes with no date attached in Google Earth. Imagery metadata in Google Earth is almost never that granular. The imagery of the tunnels could be newer, as 2005 would be a long way back to be building this plant (though not the tunnel for the plant), but there is no clear seam of a more recent image being overlaid on a base image. So my guess is that the imagery of the tunnel is from 2005 or later.)

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