The BGS recently publised the Geology of Britain website, which makes available a Geological map of Great Britain online in an interactive Map Viewer. They make available a 1:625 000 scale layer for Google Earth, and a the 1:50 000 scale version via WMS only.
Unfortunatly the WMS doesnt play nicely in Google Earth for some reason, so here is a hand tuned Google Earth layer to display the 1:50 000 scale Geological Maps:
Enjoy!
Slashgeo has been for the last few months running a poll on users acceptance of the Google Earth/Maps TOS. The poll has now been closed and the results published.
Pretty interesting, aside from the tidbit that most people don’t read the TOS, the number of people actively put off by them is quite high!
I think most of the ‘issue’ comes from the fact that the Universal Terms applies to users, use of both products. In part 11.1. it says “By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
- which to my non-legal mind means Google can take a copy of any data you display in Google Earth or Google Maps – and do what they like with it. It’s irrevocable remember.
On the whole don’t have an issue with this for Google Maps – you pretty much understand you posting public data there. But for Google Earth – which is an application on your own computer – you expect data you display there to NOT be shared with Google and its partners.
Now I am not saying Google will invoke this right and take a copy of your data, its questionable if they would want to, as the data probably lacks context, and there is probably a large amount of it. But they could if the wanted to. And the fact they chosen not to revoke this right, suggests they wanting to leave their options open.
(The Google Maps API has a different TOS, which doesnt encompass the universal terms, so a developer doesnt have to give up a copy of their data unless they choose to)
via Slashgeo
I not sure how new this is, but something I only just noticed…
Google now (officially) offers to install Google Earth without the dreaded GoogleUpdate!
It’s only offered when clicking the small ‘advanced setup‘ link on the main Download Earth page. But I think that is ok, using the updater is probably a sensible default, most people will get along just fine with auto-updating. What I have long bemoaned is there was no official way to opt out for people needing or wishing to.
Here’s that link again just in case:
Thank You Google!
Now ready with the next version of the Geograph Google Earth Clusters layer mentioned yesterday.
It’s the same download link, if you already have a copy, just right click and select Refresh on the “Geograph Google Earth Clusters” feature.
This has a number of advancements:
But its not all rosey – this version seems to suffer from an annoying bug, when first loads sometimes the layer ‘freezes’ and doesnt automatically update as you move around. If that happens right click on the ‘Clusters’ feature in ‘Places’ and select Refresh, doing that once seems to fix it!
Thanks to Geocubes to the amazing service that powers this – highly recommended if you have larger numbers of features to display!
It’s about time did some Google Earth hacking, so thanks to the people at Geocubes, have made a new interactive layer for Google Earth.
This works in a similar way to the Geograph SuperLayer, by showing coverage overview, and then zooming in to reveal more detail. The Geocubes layer has the advantage that the clusters work into a closer zoom, and updates to the geograph database make it into the layer within hours. The SuperLayer is slower updating (weeks), but navigating should be much quicker being as its based on KML regions.
You can view also a Google Maps based version of the layer, using the Geocubes API directly.
This is only version 0.1 – there is more to be done – including being able to filter the results based on words and contributor, but this is exciting enough on its own. Once done a bit of work on tidying up the code plan to release it so others can use the geocubes service to create their own layer like this 
Watch this space!
The new tour recording function introduced in Google Earth version 5, actually makes the ‘black box recorder’ I created a while ago, obsolete now
While in Flight Sim mode, hold down Ctrl and Alt and press B. Then right click somewhere in places and goto ‘Add’ and choose Tour. Then you can hide the sidebar by pressing the same combination again. Now press the record button and fly away!
Click the Record button to stop recording – dont forget to click the little disk icon if want to save the recording to Places.
Tip. Right click the Tour in your places tree, and select Copy. Then paste into a texteditor (eg Notepad) and you can see the raw KML recording.
If you have any recordings from my Recorder. You should be able to download the linestring, and click the little Tour icond beside the opacity slider, to playback. And while playing you can be recording it into a real ‘Tour’ for.
I’m just shamefaced I’m not a good enough pilot to feel confident in posting any of my recordings….
(I think this is probably the last post I will make for now, this is the fourth about the new version 5!)
Just noticed the KML documentation website has been updated to reflect the KML extensions
But most interestingly note the <description> tag of balloons are now rendered by a webkit browser, one that supports JavaScript and iFrames!
WOW. Now goto to go and play with this, this could open up GE for more interactive content (like the plugin sort of offers) …
Update: also new: List of ‘GX’ extensions…
Other than the obvious touring language (which can even open balloons!), note it adds a new <gx:altitudeMode> to cope with underwater data (links with last post) , and even <gx:LatLonQuad> to cope with non rectangluar GroundOverlays!
Besides the layers included in the new Earth Version 5 for Ocean data, I’ve just found this impressive collection:
Google Maps & Google Earth as visualization tools for marine data
Looks like much of this should load pretty well, one particully interesting (for me!) layer is “Submarine cables“. These load well in the new version, I’m guessing they will be updated in the future to work directly in new earth, but in the meantime you can change the data to underwater now!
Seems reports that Google Ocean where pretty accurate, Google have just released Google Earth v5, which besides the extra Sea floor data we saw last week, it actully makes the sea transparent so you can fly underwater… (not to mention a new ‘Ocean’ set of layers)
But thats not all, there are a wealth of other features…
), and even changes to the time sliderother minor changes…
<kml xmlns=”http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2″ xmlns:gx=”http://www.google.com/kml/ext/2.2″ xmlns:kml=”http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2″ xmlns:atom=”http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom”>
so it looks like extra stuff there – the new tours seems to be the main thing added in the gx namespace. Find out more about the Google Extensions Namespace: (more in a later post). Looks like this is going to be the way Google specific updates to KML is going to be handled now KML is controlled by OGC.
Update(s):
re KML namespace: making a few play tours and copying out the KML, the ‘touring language’ seems very comprehensive, recorsds small changes to view as a bunch of <Camera>, and pauses. Also only just noticed a ‘mic’ button, gonna have to dig out a microphone to try it… (I guess it can record a soundtrack for the tour)
Oh of course, there are plenty of further readings… GearthBlog 1 2, Google LatLong, Offical Google Blog. Offical site 1, 2. Oh more about the gx extension namespace: Brian Flood
Looking at the screenshots on gearthblog, my sea doesnt look like that its all static , I guess I need a better graphics card….
Frank, just alerted me to the new rendering Google have released for Google Earth of the Ocean Floor. Strangely I keep wanting to shout FAIL! Sure at the broadest sense – viewing the globe as a whole it looks quite nice, if a little fuzzy, but once start zooming into coastline, the matching is just a mess. The new lighter blue just sort of fades out the old darker blue. Have to say even Frank doesn’t seem convinced…
Admittedly I not really into ocean travel so the probably higher resolution doesn’t really interest me, so that puts it at a disadvantage from my point of view. Hopefully they can vastly improve the edge matching, aka the coastline, then I wont mind.
Ok so it wasn’t perfect before, having a greenish area – but it just looks like algae. But the new doesn’t look natural somehow.
Another issue (oh dear), is the new lighter blue around the UK, is a closer to shade of land. And in the overview map – example below, I can’t even see Wales, and most of England and France etc is pretty indistinct – making the overview map fairly worthless. (disclaimer: I am red/green colour blind)
Overall: E- (sorry)
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