As result of a cooperation between Google and Geoimage-Austria, more parts of Austria (even rural areas!) are now as amazing 25cm high resultion imagery available in Google Maps (in Google Earth soon):
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In Geoimage-Austria work five (out of nine) Austrian federal states together with LFRZ on creating imagery for this country. LFRZ is a former public agency, since 10 years an outsourced private company and providing the public sector with geo-technology. Their schedule is to cover the entire country with such high resolution imagery until 2009. [via GEObranchen]
I went to see an allergist today, needed to find out what substance is causing my itchy red eyes during springtime. It wouldn’t be a reason for posting but before the doctor asked me about the reason for my visit, he asked me what “GIS” means in my job title.
In Austria the term “GIS” is, among regular people, often associated with a certain agency who collects a very unpopular fee here.
So just to avoid any upcoming antipathy while sitting in front of the doctor, I started explaining what “GIS” is: “No, I’m not working for that GIS-agency charging you fees.” was my opening statement. Have that in mind when visiting this country and you intend telling people your work is related to “GIS”.
Well, nowadays it’s actually pretty easy to explain what GIS, geographic information systems, are:
“I work with spatial information and create maps.”
There was still this questioning look – “It’s like Google Earth.”
“Ah.”
Turned out that the doctor is a big Google Earth fan and I ended up giving a 12 minute presentation on imagery resolutions, explaining how the data is collected, the weirdness of European geodata policies and the revolutionary aspect of allowing free access to geodata in Google Earth. He really was fascinated and I started thinking that maybe this guy is stuck in the wrong job.
After our Google Earth chat, it took the doctor like 20 seconds to explain that the blooming birch tree is causing my itchy red eyes and to hand a prescription over.
While Microsoft is successfully integrating Portugal’s aerials within Virtual Earth, Google is asking local governments for more 3D models to add in Google Earth. Adena sums both stories very well up.
What I found a little surprising on Google’s “give us your 3D models and we bring you tourists” initiative is that last week I read something about Hamburg’s and Berlin’s 3D models in Google Earth at Geografitti (in german):
Both cities do offer 3D models for Google Earth. Since their server capacity is limited, the 3D data doesn’t load fast enough for a smooth user experience and users keep complaining at Google (!!) for the poor performance. So the question was to put the city 3D models onto Google’s infrastructure and achieve better viewing results in Google Earth. But the problem for local governments and the reason why they couldn’t eventually find a solution was that apparently Google wouldn’t allow them to access and control their data (e.g. for updates) once it’s loaded on Google’s infrastructure.
Google Earth is an amazing geo-browser and the public would definitely benefit if more public geodata would be accessible through it. On the other hand, local authorities are sometimes strange to deal with and I have my doubts if the listed points (like “Boosting tourism”) are appealing enough for them to let their data go (to a company who is not evil but based on selling targeted advertising).
Stefan Geens from Ogle Earth points out the possibly most important change in Google Earth’s EULA:
For a business entity user, the Software may be used by you and your employees for internal use…
First of all, this is excellent news for GIS professionals. Ok, but what exactly does “internal use” mean? Our IT staff is now allowed to install Google Earth by default on any business PC and Laptop. I’d assume our employees can then legally use Google Earth for preparing business trips for instance.
But how far does “internal use” go when it comes to enterprise GIS support?
Available tools like Arc2Earth make GIS result presentation in Google Earth very easy and convenient. Instead of setting up map servers, where employees explore GIS results in web browsers, an internal enterprise information strategy could shift to Google Earth as client and KML as data storage (cf. Brian Timoneys smart KML S3 solution). Would that be considered as “internal use” by Google?
Imagine the GIS department of the city of Vienna serving their data as KML to Google Earth clients on 12.000 internal workstations across the city administration. Basically it’s internal use, but I’d assume such an “internal use” would probably upset Google.
Clearly, I’m now allowed to run Google Earth on my business PC, but, as GIS professional, I’m still not sure if I can consider it as possible way to go for “internal” data dissemination strategies.
Published on
August 28, 2007 in
Geomensch.
Tags: Alpine, Austria, Garmin, Google Earth, GPS, Hiking, KML, Naturfreunde, Route, Tourism.
Naturfreunde published over 900 Austrian hiking, bike, ski, etc. routes as GPS data on their recently launched Tourenportal. In addition to the GPS tracks they provide some more information such as best season to go, an elevation profile, route length, descriptions, etc. about the routes. A KML file lets you nicely preview each tour in Google Earth. The project is a cooperation with Garmin, who is hosting the GPS routes as service too.
The GPS device is no problem, but if I only had the right shoes to do a hike I’d give that service a try. Maybe somebody should come up with a more urban tourportal…
[via kartentisch]
Never ever I’ll complain about my life again (you’re encouraged to remind me the next time I do so). Compared to other parts of the globe our problems seem so tiny and unimportant. Just received an email from a friend, working for UN in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a simple renewal of a drivers license in Kinshasa ended in the middle of a local war zone between two opponent election candidates (the election-loser and his army got a bit disappointed). A message about whistling bullets, looting, hiding and finally tanks to bring civilians out.
We all have seen pictures of African conflicts on the news or in movies, showing warlords and their armies, but it really makes a difference if somebody you know is telling you such a story.
Projects like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Darfur layers for Google Earth are clearly not enough but important to raise awareness about that regions. One can only hope that the project doesn’t stop in Darfur and that it was more than a media hype (it even qualified as headline in TV evening news here).
The Telegraph article Terrorists ‘use Google maps to hit UK troops’ sadly reads like a bad joke:
Soldiers from the Royal Green Jackets based at the Basra Palace base said they had considered suing Google Earth if they were injured by mortar rounds that had been directed on the camp by the aerial footage.
Is the army seriously thinking about suing a mapping service because they got attacked in a war?? Can’t be true…
Update
Stefan from Ogle Earth has posted an excellent analysis of the story.
Mikel Maron probably hit an important nail on the head titling his FOSS4G talk “It’s About Time for Time”.
During the last month we were producing a short animation film based on maps for a public exhibition. Working on that project was extremely interesting because for the first time we had a tool to visualize changes over time not as static calculated values (e.g. rates of change) but as dynamically changing images, as animations. Though we deal a lot with temporal aspects in our day-to-day work (spatial and regional development is all about changes over time) we found the new possibilities given by the medium film very exciting.
Rather difficult was that our audience was defined as “normal” people visiting an exhibition about a certain region. Our short film should stress and explain some important aspects of changing regional structures during the past 30 years in this particular region, within a timeframe of 10 minutes. Whereas we expected two thirds of the visitors stopping no longer than 3-5 minutes at our installation. However, developing this animation was an interesting experience and thanks to the amazing work of our graphic artist we are all very happy with the result (I’ll post a trailer here soon…).
Almost at the same time when the idea for our project was born I read that ArcGIS 9.2 comes with a built-in animation feature too (for displaying time lines). Now I’m pretty curious about how ESRI has implemented this new feature.
Google released today a new version of Google Earth supporting KML TimeStamp and TimeLines. Check the nice GPS track example in Mikel’s post to get a picture about how this works in Google Earth.
I hope they make the papers available soon and I can read some more about Mikel’s FOSS4G presentation!
Google Earth is recently being discovered as tool for public data dissemination by our Federal States too.
Additional to the print publication Almanach the Federal State of Upper Austria operates a website about alpine pastures. It’s all about alpine pastures history and their importance for the Austrian alpine space.
The online version of the publication features a search which gives you plenty of information for each alpine pasture. Besides relevant hiking information you’ll get for each site a KMZ-file to view it in Google Earth too.
The KMZ shows you in Google Earth a more detailed aerial image of the site surroundings (the satellite imagery of the alpine space is still very rough), of course the site itself containing a link to more information about it and the hiking trail to the site.
Fly to Gowilmalm!
If you like hiking in the area of Upper Austria you should definitely have a closer look at the Almanach and maybe discover a few new potential hiking destinations in Google Earth.