Google Earth Design

Map Tales vs Google Earth Tours

2011-12-23T15:22:00.000Z

Over at my other blog there's a post comparing Google Earth Tours with a web service offering similar functionality.

Misleading BBC Landscape Animation

2011-11-17T15:52:00.000Z

This is a lovely science story: A massive range of mountains completely covered by the Antarctic ice sheet has been mapped in 3D detail. The story is nicely explained in an animation similar to a Google Earth Tour.

Unfortunately it contains a visualization howler: The vertical exaggeration is about x200 and although this is marked on the above diagram, it isn't emphasized (the 4000m scale bar is off in a corner). When you play the animation, it gets worse, you aren't told about the exaggeration at all. The outcome is that untrained viewers of this visualisation will think that under the ice the topography is much steeper than the Himalayas whereas I estimate the steepest slope they have visualized is no more than 1:500.

Flood London's Bankers!

2011-10-07T18:14:00.001+01:00

I was recently asked to produce something to showcase new big screened computers in a new media room at Southampton University. VIPs watching including our Vice-Chancellor. I revisited an earlier idea where I flooded London, I rewrote the code using an animated update to produce a tour which will raise the water from 20 to 200m in 3 seconds.

Open this

Flood London.kmz

and turn off all layers in the layers panel except 3D buildings which should be on.

1] Double click 'Space to High' and you will be flown from space to a high view over london.
2] Double click 'Flood London' and sea level rises from 20m above current to 200m
3] Double click 'High to City' to be flown to the city of London. You should see the skyscrapers of London's banking center already partly flooded. Turn off the tour (black cross in tour control, bottom left of main screen) then
4] Double click 'Flood London' and the sea rises again. Experiment with controlling the tour controller bottom right to see you can become a virtual Canute.

It shows two nice teaching facilities:

Animated update which will require you to get into KML if you want to do it for yourself in another location.
A set of tours: By combining tours which fly the user around with one which controls the flood level we can build some interesting visualisations.

Google Earth vs Web Maps for Education

2011-09-09T10:42:00.000+01:00

As I said over at my new blog, I still think GEarth more useful for education than other web maps systems. Frank Taylor commented that I should note that here, I think he makes a good point and that it deserves a post.

Creating maps via the web is now wonderfully simple either by web maps or virtual globes (Google Earth, OSM, Google Maps, GeoCommons) when compared with traditional GIS. This opens all sorts of opportunities for educational development that haven't previously existed. However, I think GEarth is still the best tool for education because it has features that web maps lack:

Tours: Google Earth Tours allow educators to pre record flights around the globe either to be used as a replacement for powerpoint or for use in a class activity where students see a tour then practise a skill. Tours functionality is only available in ESRI's virtual globe apart from Google Earth.
Offline: You can cache imagery, load maps and create maps all offline with Google Earth. That has considerable advantages for many uses in education.
3D: When looking at cities (3D buildings) and landscapes where terrain is important the 3D aspect of Google Earth becomes important.
Others: Other advantages include the transect tool, great usability, a wealth of KML files on the web that can be customized for educational use and the fact that many students are used to the basic GEarth controls.

GIS for Schools: I've always said that in schools visualization is the important feature of a computer mapping system, the analysis that comes with GIS is just too complex to teach at school level, its more than enough to get students used to concepts such as symbolisation, choropleths, layers, rasters, vectors, zooming and panning. So the fact that GEarth can be used to teach all these concepts is more than enough, spending money buying anything extra is not worth it IMHO.

I'll be continuing to discuss GEarth in education here.

New Blog!

2011-09-06T10:20:00.000+01:00

Welcome back, before I left I promised an announcement. As of today I'm switching the majority of my blog writing to a new blog: Web Map Design. Check out the welcome message to see what this means for this blog and my reasons for the switch. I've also already written posts over there on Google's London Transport Map, and Goldilocks Maps.

Blog Holiday

2011-08-11T09:26:00.000+01:00

Today's was the last post until September - I'm taking some holiday and I also need to focus on some other projects. Do check back after August is over as I have something exciting in development to announce.

Navigation - Too much freedom?

2011-08-11T09:22:00.000+01:00

I'm currently writing a paper about the use of GEarth Tours in education. I thought I'd discuss one aspect that's come up: the problems of navigation in 3D software (thats Maps as well as GEarth as you effectively move through 3D space using pan and zoom).

The Problem: In GEarth you have 5 degrees of freedom:
Altitude, Latitude, Longitude, Camera Pitch, Camera direction

Controlling these is complex and so causes problems - users can:

become lost in virtual space
get disorientated
become confused as they fly through model walls (ie inside a building only designed to be seen from outside)
navigate around missing the views that the designer of a GEarth project wanted them to see.

As you may imagine any combination of these leads to the same result: users become disheartened and leave to go and look at something else.

Similar Problems in other Software: It isn't just GEarth - map systems, information spaces with pan and zoom functionality and Virtual Worlds all suffer from similar problems. In some software its possible to fly straight into the ground with nothing visible at all which is when you get 'desert fog', users don't know where they are with no visual clues on screen to help them.

Solutions: There are multiple solutions I've found in the literature, one is illustrated by Google Body: Constraining freedoms of movement from 5 to 2. When viewing the body your camera angle is fixed and you can only fly around a cylinder of fixed distance from the body (in fact it feels more like you are moving the body rather than your camear position but actually they add up to the same thing).

GEarth Tours: The solution readily available in GEarth is the GEarth tour, effectively you are constraining the user to 1 degree of freedom as within a tour they only have the ability to play or rewind - nothing else. This means that providing the tour is designed well we mitigate or solve all the problems I listed above.

In education removing those issues comes at a cost: users watching a tour are far more passive than if they are navigating around so we have to be careful to insert active tasks into tour. For example, turning the tour off for a while and having students go and search for a landscape linked to the GEarth tour they've just viewed. How to do this is the theory that we are investigating with our Google Research Award.

Usability testing and Problems with Questionnaires

2011-08-04T12:16:00.008+01:00

I came across this interesting presentation from Patrick Weber and Catherine Jones (amended to name both authors 11 August) at SOTM eu. He discusses usability issues with Open Street Maps editor using eye tracking and usability techniques. I only got the video to work by downloading it, the player didn't work.

Map Usability: What's great about this is that its a discussion about the usability of maps in the public sphere not a secret report for some company. IMHO there is a great need for much more of this work, we're woefully unaware of how to make interactive maps usable. It has lots in common with a current MSc project I'm supervising that I discussed last week looking at placemark clustering.

Simple Testing: Patrick discusses results from videoing users and eye tracking. These tools definitely help analyse and communicate the issues that arise from testing but you can still find out a lot without these tools via a technique is called Hallway testing (talk aloud procedure). It takes about half a day and needs no eye tracking or video recording.

Testing 'Doing' not Gathering Opinions: Hallway testing is pretty quick given the amount of information you get from them but its quicker still to gather feedback by questionnaires. Questionnaire feedback gives you some useful insights into your map system but it is by no way a complete picture. This was bought home to me this week in a reference I found about users searching for targets in overview* maps. The experiment tested search tasks with and without an overview map. Users were very positive about the value of overview maps but when the speed and accuracy of the searching were analysed using the overview it turned out that their performance didn't improve. Questionnaire data can be misleading, to really find out the truth you have to observe (and measure if you can) users trying to complete tasks with you map based tool.

*An overview is a small map in the corner of a web page showing the view from a higher altitude and usually marking the current view.

Where's Latitude 41 gone?

2011-08-01T15:07:00.002+01:00

I notice that a great source of neo-cartographic discussion, www.41latitude.com, is now blank with no goodbye message. Anyone know what's happened? I have an idea but if anyone's got any firm news I'd be interested to hear.

3 Crime Maps: Point collation

2011-07-27T12:28:00.005+01:00

Quick update of the Placemark Clustering project: we'll be doing user tests using the uk police crime map later this summer (discussed below) comparing it to a chloropleth grid (translation = head map based on grid, I explain further here)

In thinking about this I've hunted down some examples and I thought it would be interesting to name check 3.

No Collation: The first map is Oakland Crime Spotting (bottom inset in figure) that is very similar to San Francisco Crime mapping, reviewed here. Unlike the other two maps it attempts no point collation at all, I image the authors would argue that they deal with the problem by providing sophisticated filtering tools to reduce the point density. However, it doesn't help if the user wants to get an overview picture of crime across the area the map covers.

Traditional Choropleth: Switching to the the UK, the Metropolitan Police (=London for non UK readers) offer a choropleth map based on wards and subwards (top left insert). I regard this as the traditional approach. Notably it doesn't show actual figures for postcodes, only sub wards - a sub ward is a collection of postcodes. My problem with this is that almost no one knows the boundaries of wards and sub wards so its a strange way to split the city up. (Aside: in my experience, Londoners tend to split London up based on tube stations)

Point Collation: The UK police offer a national map which uses point collation (top right insert). This is the main one we're planning to test as IMHO it isn't an effective way to visualise the data (related post). It offers a finer grain of data - you don't actually see the true location of the crime but it is collated down to the postcode level. In London, a postcode is roughly equal to a single street.

Also worthy of a mention although not a crime map is the Google Haiti Resource finder which uses a very similar point collation method of collating data points.

How is the GeoWeb affecting the Climate Change Debate?

2011-07-22T10:03:00.004+01:00

I was recently asked by a student from Southampton's Web Science doctoral training centre to comment on how the GeoWeb is affecting global warming. It's part of a larger study he is doing on how the web affects global warming and discussion about it. Here's my response as a blog post.

Data Visualisation: The GeoWeb has lowered the bar to visualizing data on the topic of Global warming and explaining the background concepts. Examples include Simon Rogers of the Guardian who is using fusion tables to visualise data on a map. See 34mins 33 seconds into this:

He explains how he can now produce useful map visualizations without needing input from specialist software engineers.

Unfortunately Simon hasn't used fusion tables to visualize global warming data (that I can find), however, fusion tables could easily be used to produce maps such as this other Guardian map: Carbon emissions by local authority in the UK. This kind of visualization has great potential as citizens can use them to make voting decisions by comparing their local authority to the others. Maps are very powerful in this regard.

Concept Visualisation: I've also used Google Earth to help visualise climate change concepts, the below clip is explaining Gaia ideas and I use Google Earth at 1min 13secs into this clip:

Mixed Concept and Data Visualisation: Google promotes the use of Google Earth in good causes via Google Earth Outreach, they have a showcase of climate related outreach projects based in Google Earth (click 'climate' link on the right when you reach the page). The showcase is made up of concept and data visualisations. Some of these are excellent such as the National Snow and ice Data Centre (NSIDC) but others could be designed a lot better e.g. 4 degree warming (my review).

Conclusion:

I think the GeoWeb has great potential to inform the climate change debate but at present, it hasn't been nearly as well used and discussed as use of the GeoWeb in emergency aid situations and helping the democratic process (e.g. Ushahidi). Despite having a personal interest in using Google Earth to explain climate change concepts, I think the best potential of the GeoWeb in discussing climate change is not in education but in lobbying politicians to live up to their rhetoric on delivering reductions in carbon emissions. A simple 2D map showing how much carbon dioxide is emitted by region is a fantastic tool to bring politicians and policy makers to account, I wish there were more examples out there of this use.

Cutting Edge 3D - no User Tests

2011-07-13T08:54:00.003+01:00

Today I want to highlight the work of the Senseable Lab at MIT, from a brief review of their work I'd say they seem to specialise in the area of real time 3D visualization and sensor input.

Beautiful Design Ideas: From an artistic 'this is a work of art' point of view their ideas are novel, fun and highly engaging, see this TED talk for examples

I really relate to the water building, I hang out on the South Bank in London and there's a similar water sculpture there that is hugely popular (clip). Also, I'd LOVE to have some of those helicopter pixels in my lectures to illustrate geography concepts like earthquake waves to students.

Artistic 3D Visualizations of Singapore: This year the Sensable team have produced a project collecting real time data from Singapore and visualizing it. Here are some examples as a clip:

Looking from the angle of information communication there's lots to like:

Engaging animations. The graphics draw the viewer in to find out more, they're certainly engaging and artistically beautiful. I'm sure their exhibition at Singapore Art Museum was a sucess.
Elegant Time lines: They show time as a playhead moving against a timeline or against a bar chart illustrating relevant data. These elegant graphics are minimalist and communicate effectively without making the animation too busy visually. In a lot of ways they remind me of Tufte's sparklines.
3D Data Visualized Well? I've previously praised their technique in the of visualising 3D data using altitude, color and opacity at the same time as a way of getting over the problems of 3D thematic maps.

Beautiful but Ineffective? However, I worry that beyond looking attractive, these visualisations fail to communicate the data effectively. Two example issues that occurred to me:

Double 3D = Busy: In the heat vs energy consumption visualisation I think trying to show 2 sets of 3D data at once with the top layer of data partly obscuring the bottom layer doesn't work well.
Where's the Rain?: In the rainfall taxi visualisation by having the rain plot in 3D above the ground its difficult to relate where its actually falling on the ground.

I raise these issues without any evidence that they are actually problems, the only way of doing that is to conduct users tests. On the research page of the Singapore project Sensable discuss technical innovations and I admit in a real time visualisation project these are significant and important. However, there is no mention of user tests, given the amount of time and money that has gone into producing these animations wouldn't it be a good idea to find out if they actually work?

Teaching Contact doesn't = Quality

2011-07-08T08:54:00.004+01:00

This post is of interest to those in education but hasn't anything to do with maps beyond discussing a GIS course.

Best Buy Facts of Uni Courses: Recently its been announced that English universities will have to collate and publish a set of 'key facts' about each course they offer to the public, kind of the equivalent of the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) that credit cards must publish enabling customers to easily compare card with card to see how much interest they'll be paying. In theory I like the idea but the devil is in the detail of what measures you use and what they communicate to students. Amongst a series of possible problems that were suggested at the GEES conference I was at last week one is particularly close to my heart: the measure of teaching contact time with staff. I unpack this issue in the rest of this post.

Value of Blended Learning: The main project I'm working on this summer is developing a blended learning course: We have over 300 students due to take a second level GIS course this autumn and who need to complete practicals on computers. Running standard face to face computer room practicals has obvious problems so this year I am rewriting the practicals so they can be completed without face to face support. In effect we are making a big investment (my time) to produce highly polished written materials. These will offer students a better learning experience whilst avoiding the cost of face to face support. Students can still get staff support but it will be via forums and drop in sessions. If I can pull it off, blended learning offers the best solution for the staff and students in this situation.

Contact Time = Good? The problem is that this blended learning solution reduces staff contact time. Every student will think that high contact time with tutors is a good thing when looking at the key facts sheet. However, that measure has not included the value of my highly polished practicals that (I hope) more than make up for the lack of direct support.

My expertise in converting courses to blended learning comes from my time at the Open University who offer distance learning courses with even less contact time, I wonder what they think?

Do Flashy Google Earth Tours have a Place?

2011-06-17T11:48:00.002+01:00

Looking at the examples of GE tours out on the web I'm struck that they often use flashy attention grabbing effects but fail to communicate their content well, (an example discussed). However, watching this video made me pause and rethink

Intangible Value: In a very entertaining talk Rory advocates the importance of 'intangible value': its not anything real but its absolutely worth something. An example he doesn't discuss is the placebo effect, results show you can put a patient in an operating theatre, slice open their knee, wiggle some tools around inside achieving precisely nothing and the patient is likely to report a real reduction in knee pain after the un-operation. Amazing isn't it?

Chart Junk: I've always advocated the Edward Tufte approach to graphic communication, he regards anything that is not directly contributing to communication as 'Chart Junk' - anything that is there to make the tour look flash or just as decoration is getting in the way of the message and should be removed. Richard Mayer has empirical evidence showing that chart junk in educational animations (which are very similar to GE tours) has a negative effect on teaching efficiency which he calls the coherence principle.

Context is All: So is chart junk fluff that should be removed or does it add a professional feel and grab attention in a useful way? My view is that in formal education (taught classes in schools or Unis) producing intangible value should be low priority, any clever effects in GE tours fail to grab attention by the 2nd or 3rd lecture of a course. However, in an outreach context, particularly in a setting like a kiosk in a museum, a GE tour would be vying for attention against other exhibits so special effects represent intangible value that is worth having. These two contexts are extreme points on the end of a scale and there are all sorts of other contexts inbetween them for which decisions need to be made. The key question in making such design decisions is 'do I need to grab users attention?'.

Content First, Flash Presentation Second: Despite the context discussion above I would add that even in a context where flash presentation is important authors need to be careful that the message still gets through. Its no use grabbing someones attention if you fail to then do anything with the time they then give you. Juggling this need to both attract attention and also tell a good story is not easy but Hallway Testing is the solution.

My answer to the original question is 'Yes, but it depends on the context and where the answer is 'yes', be careful'.

Google Research Award – Identifying Learning Benefits of Google Earth Tours in Education

2011-06-06T09:42:00.007+01:00

It is always nice to announce good news. Back in February, together with [Muki Haklay at UCL], I submitted an application to the Google’s Faculty Research Award program for a grant to investigate Google Earth Tours in education. We were successful in getting a grant worth $86,883 USD. The project builds on Muki's expertise in usability studies of geospatial technologies, including the use of eye tracking and other usability engineering techniques for GIS and my expertise in Google Earth tours and education, and longstanding interest in usability issues.

Job Offer: In this joint UCL/Southampton project, UCL will be lead partner and we will appoint a junior researcher for a year to develop run experiments that will help us in understanding of the effectiveness of Google Earth Tours in geographical learning, and we aim to come up with guidelines to their use. If you are interested, get in contact with Muki.

Our main contact at Google for the project is Ed Parsons. We were also helped by Tina Ornduff and Sean Askay who acted as referees for the proposal.

The core question that we want to address is “How can Google Earth Tours be used create an effective learning experience?”

So what do we plan to do? Previous research on Google Earth Tours (GETs) has shown them to be an effective visualization technique for teaching geographical concepts, yet their use in this way is essentially passive. Active learning is a successful educational approach where student activity is combined with instruction to enhance learning. In the proposal we suggest that there is great education value in combining the advantages of the rich visualization of GETs with student activities. Evaluating the effectiveness of this combination is the purpose of the project, and we plan to do this by creating educational materials that consist of GETs and activities and testing them against other versions of the materials using student tests, eye tracking and questionnaires as data gathering techniques.

We believe that by improving the techniques by which spatial data is visualized we are improving spatial information access overall.

Related Project: A nice aspect of the getting the project funded is that it works well with a project that is led by Claire Ellul and Kate Jones and funded by JISC. The G3 project, or “Bridging the Gaps between the GeoWeb and GIS” is touching on similar aspects and we surely going to share knowledge with them.

For more background on Muki Haklay, see his blog. This is a joint post on both our blogs.

Grids and Scale Bars

2011-06-03T18:03:00.003+01:00

Related to my post last week about landmarks and judging distance I have some suggestions for GEarth itself.

Scale Bar Problem: At the moment if you click

View > Scale legend

you get a scale bar in the bottom left corner of GEarth. It isn't very usable as it works in the same space as the tour controller. Also, as you zoom in or out the bar itself stays static and just the measure of the distance changes. This doesn't work very well as users can't gauge what 3/4 of 772.1m is quickly.

My Solution: It would be a lot better if the bar itself changed size and the numbers stayed round until a new number was needed. So zooming from a scale where the scale bar initially showed 0 to 100m my idea would be to have the bar gradually expanding until it reaches a critical width at which point the bar snaps back to half its width and the scale numbers now read 0 to 200m.

Grid: Selecting

View > Grid

pulls up a grid of thin white lines that dynamically change as you zoom in and out. Ironically, its a lot like the solution I suggested for the scale bar above but in this case, I don't think it works as its all over the screen and is too visually busy. Better to Allow the user to choose to have a grid of a fixed width visible which has smallish crosses at intersections rather than having a complete grid. This would help with orientation and memory. If you're interested in reading further about landmarks in Virtual Worlds and Virtual Reality I can recomend this paper .

If you have your own suggestions as to how to improve GEarth, Google would like to hear from you. I've added my vote on the above topics...

Tours User Testing

2011-05-27T15:06:00.002+01:00

Earlier this year I did some user testing on Tours in Google Earth investigating my thoughts on best practices for producing tours in a more detailed fashion. Volunteers watched simple tours which flew them from one placemark to another via a variety of paths. The placemarks were then switched off and, from a high view, users were asked to identify where the markers were.

Preliminary results show some interesting outcomes that should be bourne in mind when producing Google Earth Tours (GETs):

Speed: Double click a placemark in Google Earth and you will be flown into a closer view at the default speed. We flew students around at that speed, twice as fast and half as slow but to little effect, students across the 3 speeds performed similarly whatever speed was used.

I've often worried that I'm flying students too fast for them to follow where they're flying from or to within a GET. It seems for simple paths, students can be flown surprisingly fast and still follow what's happening.

Overview: The paths used flew students from placemark to placemark at a high altitude with both placemarks clearly in view at the same time and also along the same route but at a lower altitude without being able to see both placemarks at the same time. Not having an overview dramatic reduced students abilities to recall placemark locations.

In terms of best practices this leads us to suggest that unless you have good reason not to, virtual flight segments within a GET should always include a mid point overview showing both placemarks in view if this does not naturally occur.

Distance vs Direction: Students proved good at tracking the direction they were following but were less good at guessing the overall distance between placemarks. Evidence for this is less clear but it may be worthwhile reminding students of scale when they are at overview points so they can get a sense of overall distances between map elements.

I'm writing the results up more formally for those interested.

Google IO talk on Maps Usability

2011-05-19T17:02:00.005+01:00

I was interested to watch the Google IO video above of Designing Maps Applications for Usability on Mobile and Desktop by Luke Mahé, Jez Fletcher, Justin O'Beirne as a while back I had a go at presenting my own map design ideas to developers. The other week I said I've stopped critically reviewing other people's projects but when Googlers stand up and present about map usability I think some critical discussion is deserved. Here's some thoughts in note form:

Stuff I liked:

Mobile vs Desktop: I don't do much with mobile maps so it was interesting to have the differences between mobile and desktop discussed, I liked the idea that users on the desktop are 'planning'
Rendering Speed: Fast response is an integral part of the UX (user experience), I haven't really thought about this before except for very slow rendering maps so the discussion at 21 mins in was useful.
Emphasising: Justin's points about how to use the GMaps API to demphasise uneeded map elements (30mins onwards) were smart and well made. I liked his examples of both good and bad maps.
White roads for routes I especially liked Justin's point about making roads white for route focussed maps (36 mins), he's right that it emphasises the route well.

Stuff I didn't:

Placemark Clustering: At 14.29 Jez and Luke promote the idea that a placemark clustering visualisation is better than not clustering points. Strictly they're correct as it is a way of tackling the 'too many points' problem but I think placemark clustering is flawed and not as good as other techniques. It should be said that this is my opinion - it may be that the clustering they show is actually a very effective technique, the proof would be a user test (which I will have a student looking at later this summer). My point is you shouldn't promote an unproven technique.
Walk the Walk: It would have been good if the heat map Jez and Luke presented at at 14.58 had heeded Justin's smart advice and faded the background so the mix of colors stood out. To be fair, I guess it wouldn't have been straight forward to do this as it was a fusion tables map visualisation rather than a straight instance of the maps API but it can't be that difficult.
Missing Topics: So they covered a lot of topics but there's a of UX things that IMHO are relevant to developers that I discussed but which failed to get a mention: Layer control, Icon design (although they did point out that you should choose useful icons rather than just use the default markers), use of color, balloon design, map copy/micro-copy and introductions.

Google IO 2011

2011-05-16T10:46:00.003+01:00

I've never been to Google IO, I'm told the tickets are v difficult to get but looking at the recordings of the sessions, it could be one to think about for the future.

Mano Marks and Sean Askay on High Perfomance KML is excellent so far, I've only got part way through but Sean has already shown some combinations of Tours and the timeslider, update to change the elevation of polygons and a GPS track and heart rate visualisation that I want to play with. Sean's also launched a new site unchartable.com with similar content that I'm going to be watching.

I'm also watching a video on fusion tables which has some good new features about the fusion table/google maps tie up.

Credit to Google for getting this all recorded and released so quickly.

Does 3D suck?

2011-05-09T09:40:00.002+01:00

I was on a road trip holiday the week before last and before I left I read this James Fee blog post he has an image of Godzilla walking into electricity pylons with the tag line 'Google Earth keeps bumping into things trying to work out why it is here'. This led me to ruminate and I quickly wandered from James' post about GEarth enterprise to the more general 'what is Google Earth good for?'. I considered features such as

layer control
zooming
time animation

but, powerful those these are for visualisation, they are all also available in Google Maps and are just as much 2 as 3D*. What truly sets a virtual globe apart from web mapping is 3D and this is what I ended up ruminating on most of all:

Current Uses of 3D. I don't have much time for fancy graphics, so beyond cool looking 3D flights, what does 3D in Google Earth actually add to understanding at the moment? There are several examples:

3D buildings: Populating a city with 3D models adds a lot of value to urban geography, you can see what a skyline looks like or enhance what you've seen on a walk through a foreign city by revisiting your walk in GEarth later. 3D trees are available in GEarth too but I don't think they're nearly as useful as the buildings.
Mountains and Valleys: When considering topics where topography is important a 3D view can add understanding. The Appalachian Mountain removal project is a perfect example as the location of the mines on the tops of the mountains is key to understanding the problem.
Earth Science Models: 3D models of large scale processes on our planet such as subducting plate margins and hurricanes can add understanding, see the project I'm working on with Old Dominion University and others.
Streetview and Panoramas: Streetview and gigapan panoramas come close to giving a realistic 3D view of a scene. Streetview enables you to move from location to location whilst a gigapan allows you to zoom in on interesting features of the panorama.

IMHO the Streetview/Panorama example is the most important of these. However, the 3D visualisations discussed above are far less common on the web than the uses of 2D like data mashups, real time maps and map related infographics.

Future Uses of 3D: But what is available now may not be the whole story. Can we imagine a use for 3D in the future that is the 'killer app?'. Here's some possible future uses:

Real 3D Earth Science Models: Currently the way to present a 3D geology model is to slide it out of the ground to give the viewer the idea that its come from underground. It works pretty well but it would be good to be able to fly beneath the earth's surface and show models in their real situation.
Thematic 3D data: I've frequently discussed 3D thematic maps on this blog, mostly unfavourably. However, the 'Obama: One People' visualisation I discuss here looks to me like it really adds something, I think 3D thematic maps could be useful visualisations but they remain unproven - no one has done user tests on them.

I can foresee that Streetview and similar panoramas will improve in time with real time 360 views and developments like Microsoft's streetslide helping make them more usable. Beyond that, neither of the topic areas listed above is convincing as a killer app.

2D Dominance: So I don't think 3D is ever going to topple 2D as the best way to visualise spatial data. This may seem a little surprising, we live, work and move about in 3D all the time, why won't 3D will become more common? What this point misses is that we also symbolise all the time too, a road map is far more useful than satellite imagery for navigating with because it strips out everything unnecessary (trees, people, greenhouses) and leaves exactly the information we need: roads and junctions as symbols. Usually the best visualisation is the simplest one possible so if a spatial problem can be visualised in 2D its best to do it that way. Especially if you are rendering the map on a small screen smart phone. We live on a planet that were it reduced to the size of a billiard ball would be smoother than any in the world so it really isn't surprising that most of our spatial data can be effectively reduced to 2D.

*of course you can now pull 3D GEarth into a Google Maps but I'm not really focussing on the technology here.

Gapminder and GA Conference 2011

2011-04-21T16:30:00.003+01:00

So at the GA Conference last weekend the most interesting thing for me was Hans Rosling and Gapminder. Hans's talk was excellent, as he was addressing a set of Geography teachers he went into more depth about some map design characteristics of the Gapminder World. If you haven't come across it I recommend you give it 4.5 minutes of your time by watching this video

Thematic Maps: Gapminder started out visualising the data with a standard thematic map of the world which they colored to show changing variables like rise in GDP. Hans said they soon rejected that as countries with big areas such as Australia dominate the view visually. That's a clever insight IMHO.

Map with Symbols: So they tried circle symbols and varied their sizes. This was better but a change in size isn't as visually arresting as movement. Hans's smart phrase was : 'movement has a direct highway to the brain'. So they ended up with their famous graph visualisation and a map tab you can click to see a map presentation. I think the key point about the data presentation is that country location isn't that important, all you really need to know is which continent a country is in. This means the map can be ditched in favour of a graph plot which brings with it the advantages of movement and the ability to draw tracks.

I couldn't help thinking that Hans the statistician seems to know more about good graphical and map design than a lot of GeoWeb developers and GIS specialists I know.

Happy Easter Break!

GA Conference 2011 - Links and Slides

2011-04-19T10:40:00.004+01:00

I had a great time at the GA conference last week, I gave two workshops on using Google Earth in education. Lots of people thought the sessions should be longer and asked for links to the materials. These are the slides from the Introductory session (you'll need a Google account if you haven't already got one). They include:

Links to the first 3 lessons as presented in the session
A Link to video versions of the other 5 lessons
Links to the files I used to illustrate the Case Studies

These are the Advanced Session Slides. They include:

More Case Studies of use

I'll write up some thoughts on the conference later.

7 Foot White Elephant: When Globes Fail

2011-04-14T16:02:00.003+01:00

Negative Reviews: Observant readers of this blog may have noticed I've stopped doing reviews of Google Earth projects recently. They took a lot of time and I'd always get a defensive response from the authors which isn't any use in starting dialogue and discussion about map/Virtual Globe design. However, someone actively promoting bad techniques of geo-visualization in a keynote presentation deserves a rebuttle so here's some thoughts on Julia Grace's keynote from Web 2.0 Expo NY 2010:

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At 2.29 she shows a graphic with static, old style pie, line and bar charts:

"whenever I see these sorts of charts, something inside of me dies. The bottom line is that we can do better than this"

Simple is Best: Well yes, sometimes a highly interactive graphic is a great answer to a communication problem but a lot of the time simple non-interactive graphics are better. Perfect example, David MaCandlass's graphic of scare stories with time. Its well produced but at its heart it's a simple line graph:

At 5.34 into her keynote I end up agreeing with Julia for a while. She name checks the interactive NYT Oil spill map as being an excellent visualisation. I agree with her on that, its a great use of an interactive map tools to help the user understand the spill.

Map on a Globe: At 6.06 she then discusses a 2D map of IBM offices she had to use, she thought it sucked because of map distortion, her solution? Go out and buy a 7 foot globe and project the map onto that (an image comes up at 6.39). Apparently the globe was so large it wouldn't go through the door of their offices.

The Problem with the Globe: The problem she thinks she's solved is an ancient one: you can't represent the earth's surface on a flat surface without distorting the map in some way. However, although the globe solution she's promoting does solve the distortion it has an even more important flaw: now you can't see all the offices at the same time because they're on different sides of the globe. Even if the globe was the best solution, what's so wrong with a virtual globe on an iPad? A whole lot cheaper and much, much easier to get through doors.

When High Tech is not Cool: But what I really object to in this talk is the tone. Simple visualisations are likened to 'Tron', old, flat and outmoded whereas 'Minority Report' visualisations are cool, 3D and the shape of things to come. Of course this isn't true, the best data visualisation solution is defined primarily by the audience you're addressing and sometimes simple is best. You'll notice she never mentions users and usability.

Investigation into Placemark Clustering

2011-04-08T17:13:00.005+01:00

First of all I'll start by making a point by considering a couple of examples of the development of everyday technologies:

College Dropout changes Computer text: The text you're reading on screen would be very different were it not for the actions of a student dropout. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed college but, because it interested him, still attended a class in calligraphy. The techniques he learnt, about elegant letter spacing and formats, were later applied to the Mac and from there were copied by windows. We've all benefited from Steve's nerdy love of text.

Spam Email didn't have to exist: Email was invented early in the history of the internet but because everyone then knew each other by name, no one bothered to produce code in email programs that checked the ID of senders. We all suffer because this didn't happen, the internet is swamped by spam email traffic that could have been avoided. Google Wave was an attempt to get us all off email to avoid this sort of problem, it didn't take off despite having the promotional weight of Google behind it.

Get Technology right early on: My point is that its incredibly important to try and get early technology right otherwise you may never be able to correct it. One of the issues I see like this in web mapping is the clustering of points, if we get it wrong now we may never be able to undo it and we will end up using sub optimal visualisation techniques just because we've always done it.

Clustering Placemarks: Previously I've written about the problem, placemarks need clustering because at a certain density of points it is becomes impossible to pick individual points out. IMHO some of the ways of visualising these are poorly designed e.g. clustering placemarks into 'blobs' with numbers.

It may be that numbered blobs work as a way of clustering placemarks - maybe users immediatly get the concept of a large blob being a cluster and that outweighs other problems I've identified. But what worries me is that this technique is all over the place in web maps and no one has actually done any user testing to show that its effective.

Enter my new MSc student Craig who's doing his project on this map visualisation. By doing a series of user tests we hope to answer the questions:

* Does blob clustering work compared with other techniques?
* If not, can we adapt it so it does?

Wider Point: This isn't the only example of a technique that is being widely used in web maps without being user tested (anyone for 3D thematic maps?) so I think Craig's work will also be important in promoting the more general idea that we need usability testing in web maps. At the moment I think web programmers are applying these untested techniques because they think the look flash and/or they are easy to apply because the software needed is readily available.

Street View in Tours: Ancient Rome

2011-03-31T15:00:00.006+01:00

AFAIK I was the first blogger to spot that the new GEarth tours in GE6 supported streetview. I still think this a great bit of functionality and I'm surprised I haven't seen it popping up more. Today I came across yesterday's blog post by Google about how their streetview trike has been capturing imagery of historic European sites (what a cool job that trike operator must have), really clever use of the technology but I was interested in the way they presented the streeview examples: They linked out to GMaps instances of streetview from within the blog, three examples are shown here:

View Larger Map

Colosseum

View Larger Map

Imperial Forum

View Larger Map

Palantine Hill

It works and is impressive but this form of presentation is clunky if you wanted to see the relationship between sites in which case a GEarth tour becomes the media to choose. As an experiment I've produced these three sites in a GEarth tour, it's a bit rough but I think you can see my point about how this is a better way if the geographic relationship of the three sites is important.

to play in GEarth itself Rome Street View tour

Note I used the wrong forum site.

Good Design Points:

You'll note that by use of annotations for Rome, and a 'reference' square I give a sense of location and scale to the viewer.
Use of the square allows people to memorise the locations of the three sites as it acts as a strong landmark.
I return to high views between sites as this allows people to follow where they're being flown to.
I also customised the Colosseum views and tour path (by choosing a different high view) as in its original format the tour flew through the Colosseum walls - distracting for the viewer.
I make explicit remarks about how the user can pause the movie to look around and also about how fast the imagery is likely to be downloading. The former is necessary to encourage active use of a tour, most people will hit play and sit back if you don't actively suggest they could do something different. The comment about imagery download will help those on slow connections who may be thinking 'its not working' as all they can see is a pixelated sludge on screen.

Technical Points:

In KML you can control turning on and off streetview, the sunlight slider and historical imagery. It would be useful to be able to do the same for 3D buildings and roads. However, by using the Tour gadget to produce GEarth in a browser (as I did) you can control these layers without needing to code anything.

I also noted that streetview imagery is low resolution until you click pause at which point it sharpens up.

Old Maps of Africa in audio slideshow

2011-03-25T09:41:00.003Z

Sorry for the lack of posts, work has been unexpectedly busy over the last 2 weeks.

I came across this wonderful BBC audio slideshow of old maps in Africa promoting this Royal Geographical Society exhibition.

Things about Africa you didn't know: The content is excellent, it explains where the name Africa comes from, explains why the Atlantic was originally known as the 'Black Man's Sea' and also makes an excellent point about the political power of maps: early maps showed the locations of tribes inland so the maps seemed full of people, later European maps showed empty spaces with color wash to indicate which European power controlled that area. People still lived there but the map makers wanted to show Africa as a blank land helping to justify their desires to colonise and exploit.

Simple Narrative is Effective: The presentation itself shows the power of simple, audio, slide show narration. There is no flashy 3D fly throughs, talking heads or 'cool' animated effects, just some music, audio description and the occasional annotation to draw the eye to the right location on the map. If you had just been given the maps as a set of layers to look at in GEarth you could have seen how the maps line up with current African geography but you would probably have missed the 'Ifrica' point they make, IMHO the narration adds a lot of value. Of course providing such a GEarth project after the presentation would have been fun as you would have got the best of both worlds: heard expert explanation but also been free to explore your own interests on the maps. This is an idea I've previously talked about in terms of GEarth tours and activities

Fusion Tables for Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)

2011-03-09T14:36:00.003Z

VGI Background: There is a lot of discussion about Maps Crowdsourcing (or Volunteered Geographic Information - VGI) on the web at the moment. The excellent Geospatial Revolution clips are an example, this one discusses VGI as used by Open Street Map and Ushahidi in Haiti:

Note: Starts playing at relevant point in movie clip

I've just revamped a lecture for next week discussing VGI in depth and I wanted to get students to create and upload some VGI data but also to understand how to create a very simple VGI system. The solution was Google Fusion Tables.

Fusion Tables Background: For a while now I've heard Mano Marks amongst others pushing the geo capabilities of fusion tables (up coming where 2.0 example), this is the first time I've found an application for them. Neo-Geography is a term for all the new uses of interactive maps and map like visualisations appearing on the web, services like Google Maps, Google Earth are examples, they principally allow the public to visualise geographic data. What is so different about fusion tables is that they offer the ability not just to visualise but also to get into simple analysis of geographic data. Thus in Google Earth I can see Haitian refugee camps but with Fusion tables, it becomes easy to color code them by size. Fusion tables are also free and a lot more simple to operate than desktop GIS.

HowTo: Create VGI Thematic map: The following HowTo takes you through the steps of creating a database, uploading VGI data in the forms of polygons, defining a palette and outputting the result.

1] In GEarth digitise a number of polygons and give each of them a variable value (just 2 digits, no text) in the description box. E.g. I get students to digitise clumps of trees around Mt St Helens and give them a percentage tree cover value. Put all the polygons in a folder then save the folder as a KML file.

2] Go to the fusion tables site. If you do not already have a Google account you will need to set one up.

3] Click on File > New table > Import data > From this computer > Choose file, then upload your kml file. Click next then check the import columns include a 'description' column before clicking 'next' again to accept. Write a relevant description in the ‘Description’ box presented, then click Finish.

4] Your data should appear in a table with columns for description, name, and geometry. The Geometry column is the data Google Earth uses to draw each polygon, click on one of the kml labels to see the list of lat longs it uses.

5] Click on Visualize > Map. Your polygons should appear in a mashup using Google Maps, select ‘Satellite’ top right to see the true terrain. You will notice they are a default red at present. To create a simple thematic map we will apply a palette to the polygons colouring them a different colour depending on the percentage cover entered in GEarth.

6] Click on Visualize > Table to switch back to table view. Select Edit (on the menu bar) > Modify Columns > description > Type > Number > Save. This changes the percentages you entered in the GEarth description balloons from text to numeric values and you will see the description column right justify itself as a result.

7] Switch back to map view, now select Configure Styles (on the top of

the map) > Polygons, Fill colour > Buckets

Click the Radio button and on the pull down menu select 5 buckets. Select Column > description.

8] By default you have been given equal sized buckets (20% each), change them if you want. You should change the colours in the pull down menus on the right of the dialogue box to something appropriate. Click Save to apply this palette.

You should now see your palette displayed.

9] Now you have set up your VGI system, add others to the fusion table (share button top right of your fusion table web page > choose collaborators who can edit).

10] Get your volunteers to complete step [1] then access the fusion table and choose File > Import more rows to upload their own polygons.

Viola! A basic VGI system.

NeoCartography Commision and New Design Blog

2011-03-02T10:55:00.003Z

A couple of developments passed through my inbox this week with the encouraging news that there a growing number of us interested in GeoWeb Usability or NeoCartography:

Linking neo-geographers and cartographers: Steve Chilton (who I interviewed on this blog in 2007 ) is the nominated chair of a proposed International Cartographers Association Commission on NeoCartography. The basic idea is to foster links between the communities of cartography and neogeography, I've just emailed Steve to add my own support as its clear to me that both communities have much to learn from one another.

An Italian Map Design Blog: Giacomo Andreucci from Bologna University emailed me to tell me he enjoys this blog (thanks) , has launched a new maps design blog and that he has produced his own variation of my (old!) list of 10 worst design errors . He has also produced a book which I can't comment on as its in Italian but he tells me he starts it with his own 10 design errors.

Geography's Importance in Schools: National Curriculum

2011-02-23T14:17:00.005Z

In the UK the government has called for a consultation about Geography in the national curriculum. Here's part of my response:

Question: Why should Geography be maintained with a national curriculum (i.e. the government defines what schools teach rather than just advising them what to do):

Geography is a vital area for schools to cover in the future both for the safety of the environment we live in and also our economic future for two main reasons:

1] Climate change is the central issue that our country will be facing in the future, whether or not it is front and centre of government policy right now. We need citizens of this country to have as much of an understanding of this as possible to be able to engage in the debate, both the science and the human sides of the discussion. .

2] There is an explosion in the availabilty and visualisation of spatial data, maps and map related graphics occurring on the web at present and the UK is at the forefront of this work with economic benefits for the UK. For evidence of this you only have to view Tim Berners-Lee's recent presentation 6 minute presentation to TED on open data:

In it he uses maps as visualisation tools no less than 8 times for 9 mini case studies of open data.

In 'any other points you wish to make':

I am particularly concerned about a specialist part of the Geography curriculum which forms my research interests. The use of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) at school level has appeared in the school curriculum without a proper understanding of the complexities, uses and value of this topic area. The curriculum mis-informs them how to implement GIS in their teaching. It is my opinion that at school level school students should be using ICT to visualise map data e.g. view a map showing the voting patterns across the UK and to see the general pattern that Conservatives do well in the country, Labour does well in cities. Then zooming closer in, eg. on London, to see that it isn't all labour voters. Teachers are confused thinking that they need to use more than ICT visualisation, e.g. proper GIS analysis of geographical data, e.g. to get the computer to draw zones around motorways and relate that to respiratory problems in the area. Analysis like this is too complex for school students to tackle and, as well as this teaching problem, it encourages schools to waste money on buying GIS packages that are more powerful than necessary whereas free software, such as Google Earth is perfectly satisfactory for visualising geographical data and thus teaching geography in schools.

Google Earth Presentation II

2011-02-22T12:00:00.005Z

Last weeks tutorial on creating presentations was complex so I produced an XL spreadsheet to simplify things. The instructions to use this are:

How To Make Your own Presentation:

You will need a Google Account so you can create Google docs and to be able to produce a Presentation in docs.
In Google Docs create your presentation (relevant help).
Click Share (top right) > Publish/Embed then copy the link that appears under the 'Your document is viewable at'. Paste this text (beginnin "https://..." into cell C2 of this spreadsheet. Select the big cell with lots of text below it and right click > Copy.
Back in GEarth, select 'temporary places' in the places column and right click > Paste. Click on the cross to the left of 'KmlFile' to expand your list. You've just created a set of 10 placemarks with links to your presentation. If your presentation is less than 10 slides long you can delete the unnecessary placemarks.
Choose your starting position, generally you want to start with a high view covering all the locations if that's possible. Select the ''Presentation" folder and create a tour flying from here to your first location (tour creation howto). Call it something sensible, e.g. "tour 1"
Drag your Tour up the list until it is above the "**Click for Slide1**" text
You can now test your presentation, double click the tour then when its complete, click the line "**Click for Slide1" and you should see your presentation slide in.
Repeat steps 5 and 6 creating lots of tours that you drag inbetween the slide placemarks.
Select the KmlFile icon and Right click > save as to save the presentation.

Google Earth Presentation

2011-02-14T16:05:00.007Z

Edit 16/2/11: Corrected broken link to presentation example

If you're like me you make presentations using PowerPoint and GEarth and spend your time flicking between the two. This isn't very slick and I think a combination of the two would be very powerful. It turns out it isn't difficult to do taking advantage of Google Docs Presentations and the integrated web browser in GEarth. Download this presentation example.

To run the presentation:

Click the link that starts "https"; the lower of the 2 lines to the right of the slide 1 in the Places Column.*
The first presentation slide opens in the browser (it may delay on the first slide). Click the right arrow that appears bottom left of the screen repeatedly to make the presentation build up . Continue until the text '<- Back' appears bottom right.
Now double click the "High to London" tour in the Places column. GEarth flies to London.
Repeat [1] for slide 2
Repeat [2] for slide 2
Repeat [3] but click "London to Shropshire" tour instead
Repeat [1] for slide 3

*If you click the line 'slide 2' you will open a balloon rather than opening the browser directly. If you click the tick box icon to the right the tick will disappear but nothing else will appear to happen at all.

It's a little fiddly but better than flicking between PowerPoint and GEarth.

How To Make Your own Presentation:

**NB: For simpler process via a spreadsheet see this later post

You will need a Google Account so you can create Google docs and to be able to produce a Presentation in docs.
I used incremental reveal to make the slide develop step by step but you don't have to. You may want to make the last increment of each slide read 'next tour' as I did so that you know when the end of the slide is reached, otherwise you may keep clicking and go onto the next slide at the wrong time.
In Google Docs Produce your presentation (relevant help).
In GEarth Produce a project folder (click 'temporary places' in the places column so it gets a blue background then right click > Add > Folder).
Choose your starting position, generally you want to start with a high view covering all the locations if that's possible. Create a tour flying from here to your first location (tour creation howto). Call it something sensible, e.g. "tour 1"
Now create a placemark, in the dialogue box that opens, click the icon button in the top right corner. In the new dialogue that opens choose 'no icon' at the bottom. This means no icon appears in the main screen, this placemark will just carry the link to the presentation. Click 'OK' once to get back to the main 'Edit Placemark' dialogue but don't close it yet.
Open your Google Docs presentation in a browser. Click Share (top right) > Publish/Embed then copy the link that appears under the 'Your document is viewable at'. Paste this text into the big description box of the placemark dialogue in Google Earth.
At the end of the text add the string "&skipauth=true&start=0". There must be no spaces and it should end up looking like this: "https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg7jd85c_27c3mm9bf7&skipauth=true&start=0" (i.e. everything will be the same except the text between 'id=' and '&skipauth=...' and it should all be on one line in GEarth).
The string of text you added tells the browser to open the presentation at slide zero. Confusingly, to the browser slides are numbered "0,1,2..." rather than "1,2,3..." hence we start at slide 0.
Name your placemark "Slide 1" Click OK in the dialogue box and you should see a placemark appear in the places column. clicking the link should open the first slide in the browser window.
Record a tour from the current location to your next location.
Select Slide 1 placemark in places column, Right Click > Copy then Right Click > Paste. Drag the new placemark down the places column to the correct location. Right click > properties and change the '0' on the end of the string in the description box to a '1'. Click OK. If you now select the link in this new placemark you should see the next slide of your presentation.
Repeat steps [11] and [12] as many times as necessary. I would advise you to put in an intermediate high point between 2 locations if they are both low as I did between London and Shropshire as this allows users to see where they've been and where they're going.
Now make sure all placemarks and tours are in the folder you created in step [4], drag them in if necessary. Select that folder and Right click > save as to save the presentation.

Notes:

No Offline: This technique can't be used offline as the presentation tool only works when you're online. If you won't get wifi where you're going the only slick alternative is to pre-record movie clips of tours in Google Earth and embed those in your PowerPoint. Its trustworthy but takes a lot of time.
Videos: You can embed youtube clips and similar multimedia in the presentation which would be useful.
Markers: If you wish to mark locations on the ground you can add a 'markers' sub folder as I have and put in placemarks, polygons as you wish.

I don't know how much development work it would be but this would obviously be much slicker and easier if you could record the opening of the browser and the URL it calls in tours and control it with a universal 'Next/Previous' pair of buttons that worked both GEarth and the presentation.

Dreamweaver for Google Earth

2011-02-04T10:50:00.006Z

I noticed that Declan wrote up an idea we kicked around in September (see 'September' on the DigitalPlanet pages), so I thought it deserved a post. I referred to it then as 'Dreamweaver for KML.

Image courtesy of favbrowser. A bit out of date but still interesting.

Browser History: In 1997 Netscape adds a feature to its Netscape communicator browser that allowed for WYSIWYG simple production of html web pages. To put that in context you have to recall that this was the late days of the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape. Then in March 1998 Macromedia release dreamweaver 1, this allowed web pages to be created in WYSIWYG or code views and produced short cuts that produced elegant html. It was also extensible so you could write a 'macro' to produce custom HTML. Developers loved it.

Geo-Browser History: My point is that if you regard GEarth as a geo-browser then the history is similar. Today in GEarth you can create simple maps and tours just like in Netscape communicator you could create simple web pages. However, a lot of sophisticated features such as time, region control, pauses in tours need to be hand coded into the KML. There are a few tools out there that allow you to produce KML without hand coding such as the spreadsheet mapper, my spreadsheet for adding loops and a tool for adding screen overlays but these are all limited in scope.

Tool Description: An obvious improvement would be 'Dreamweaver for Google Earth', where all this functionality was combined into one specialist KML producing program just as dreamweaver was a specialist HTML producing program. It would need to be:

WYSIWYG, ie be able to write code directly or using wizards and then see the result in an instance of the GE API
Extensible allowing you to write an extension that produced your favourite snippet of KML structure.
Elegant, highly usable and producing well formed KML code

So what should its wizards allow you to produce? My list would be:

Time control
Screen Overlays
Functionality producing usable maps e.g. color palettes that avoid color blindness issues
Simple sketchup models such as a photo billboard
Region controls

as well as enhancements to editing tools that are already available in GEarth such as better polygon digitising controls.

Flash Editor for Google Earth? So why haven't I mentioned tours yet? Well, I think the analogy here is with FutureSplash Animator (later 'Flash') released by Macromedia in 1996 which was a timeline based tool for producing animations on the web. It pre-dated Macromedia Dreamweaver and was kept separate. To me, it makes sense that a Google Earth tour is an animation so it needs a separate animation editing tool that is timeline based, I explain in more detail here (although I discuss it by comparison Captivate, another timeline based tool).

So Why aren't you Building these programs then? because if I did, and it was a sucess, a certain company ending with 'Oogle' and beginning with 'G' would bring out a rival and completely blow me out of the water. Instead this is a lazy web request.

Conrad Wolfram on Teaching Maths with Computers: Dangerously Wrong

2011-01-24T17:45:00.004Z

Warning: Nothing much about maps or GEarth in this post.

So I just watched this TED talk about teaching kids maths using computers:

He makes some excellent points in it but IMHO his argument is deeply flawed.

So who rattled the bars of your cage?: It's a fair point, I may know about teaching geography with computers but what do I know about teaching math? Well, in my past I spent time teaching maths to geologists undergrads with low academic achievement and I've also been on a team that built an online set of materials teaching maths to geologists (which has now disappeared from the web).

Maths by Hand: I agree with Conrad that hand calculation of maths problems is not good training for our school students, as he points out its a relatively small, uninteresting part of a bigger question. Getting students to define a real world problem in maths terms and then understand how the numerical answer is limited is more difficult and much more important.

So what's wrong?: The techniques that he advocates - e.g. using real world examples or verifying the answers, are aspects of constructivism which is not necessarily about using computers and has been around for years. He goes on to advocate programming as necessarily giving students a good grounding in maths, again, this approach is nothing new, logo programming was put forward as a way to teach students math techniques in the 80s. As this review reveals, the technology has a lot of merit but testing results were far from conclusive. As an example, when discussing the use of logo programming to teach geometry it says:

"In summary, studies show that success [teaching geometry with logo] requires thoughtful sequences of Logo activities and much teacher intervention. That is, Logo's potential to develop geometric ideas will be fulfilled if teachers help shape their students' Logo experiences and help them to think about and make connections between Logo learning and other knowledge the student might have"

(emphasis mine) Doesn't sound a lot like Conrad's silver bullet does it?

History of Technology and Education: The phrase 'computers as a silver bullet' worries me because I researched the history of Technology in Education recently. What I found is that numerous times the technology of the day has been touted as offering a paradigm shift in improving education but every time it has been found to be over hyped. Examples in the 20th century were radio, film, TV and computers (Penrose talk prezi slides 4 to 8) all of which failed to deliver because the students' needs were lost in the misguided application of technology. To be fair, Conrad does mention that computers can deliver poor teaching but he maintains that programming is the silver bullet for math teaching.

Conclusion: Students's educational needs are complex to meet and require experienced teachers using whatever technology is appropriate to the task at hand, be that computers or a big bit of paper with some felt tip pens. Teaching technologies touted as silver bullets have always been, and will always be, a dangerous distraction.

Flood Simulation HowTo

2011-01-20T16:35:00.009Z

EDIT 26 Jan 11: changed relative to ground to absolute, thanks to Google Earth Blog

In his novel 'Book of Dave', Will Self imagines a world in the future where sea levels have risen over a 100m.

This destroys civilization as we know it but leaves London skyscrapers still standing half underwater in the sea - the remaining humans who live on 'Ham' (an island created from the rising sea surrounding the high ground of Hampstead Heath, London) climb one of these which they call 'Central Stack' to capture seagulls. As the book has a map of Ham in the front I played around in Google Earth to see how accurate the boundary of the island actually was, as it happens, Will's imaginary island is what would really occur if sea level rose that far.

I realised the technique I used (one a teacher pointed out to me at a training session a while back) could be used in a lesson to visualize rising sea levels or ancient ice sheets. If you draw a polygon and give it an altitude that is about ground level the sheet created will disappear below the ground where the land is higher but be visible where the land is lower. Here's how to create a series of these sheets in a folder so you can show a sequence of increasing sea levels :

Click the Temporary Places folder in the Places column (it will get a background) then right click > Add > Folder. Add a name in the dialogue box and tick the 'Show contents as options' box. You'll see why in a moment.
Navigate to a location you want to 'flood' in the main screen. Right click the folder you've just created > Add > Polygon. Move the dialogue screen that opened out of the way (I move it to the bottom of the screen) and click the 4 corners of a square. Make it less than 10 miles across otherwise wierd things happen to the layer because of the curvature of the earth (I think, see note below)
Drag the dialogue box back into view and under the 'Style, Color' using the controls titled 'Area' select an appropriate color for the square (blue for sea level rise, white for an ice sheet?) also select an opacity of 30% or so.
Under the Altitude tab choose an altitude of 100m and then select ~~'Relative to Ground'~~ 'Absolute' in the pull down menu. This will raise your colored square 100m above the ground.
Name your square something sensible but with a '100' in it (e.g. "London 100m") then click OK.
Now right click the element you created in the Places column and select copy. Right click the copy >Properties > Altitude and change the altitude to 200m. Change the name to replace 100 with 200 and click OK.
You should now have 2 sheets, one at 100m altitude and one at 200m. Clicking in the circles turns one on and the other one off automatically.
Experiment with altitudes that works for your chosen location, copy and paste more sheets if necessary by repeating step [6] - within the folder you created only one sheet will be visible at any one time.
Right click the folder and select 'Save As' to save and send to someone else.

3D Buildings: It's a lot of fun to turn on the 3D buildings layer whilst you have sheets visible in the layers column, as in the screeen shot the layers will show how deep buildings would be sunk in the sea - not sure if any of those in the screen shot are Central Stack.

Absolute Heights: Experimenting with the levels, the sheet behaves oddly, it doesn't meet the land at the height you would expect. I'm not sure why this is but it may do with the curvature of the earth (in the middle of a big square the earth will protude through a level sheet even though there is no topography). If anyone has a definitive answer I'd like to know.

Surface Flicker: If you zoom into the layers from a distance you may see line of where land meets sheet flicker and change. This is because GEarth creates the view of the earth you see by taking the satellite images and draping them over a set of 'posts' it builds rather like a marquee tent. If you view the ground from a higher altitude GEarth uses fewer posts so the surface changes as you zoom in and out. There is a way around this but its fiddly, I'll post about it if anyone's interested.

Penrose Geoscience Education and Research Conference

2011-01-14T11:46:00.002Z

So I've had some time to get over my jet lag and reflect on this conference held at the Googleplex last week, the conference website is now public.

I had a great time, the trouble with being an earth scientist/KML developer/educational expert as I am is that I never quite fit at any conferences I go to. This one was an exception, as an example: on the bus on the field day I had a conversation with the colleague sitting next to me about extractind DEM data from Google Earth, then switched to talking to the colleague behind me about the value of project based teaching in US schools. Then we hopped out of the bus and went and looked at rocks. Ace!

So cherry picking things that stood out for me:

Effective use of 3D: Barbara Tewksbury described how she used some stunning geological examples in arid regions to teach the introductory geology concepts strike and dip. (abstract here)

Avatars in GEarth: Steve Wild and Mladen Dordevic described the latest progress on getting communicating avatars into GEarth for the purpose of group teaching geology (disclosure: I'm a consultant to this project). Using JavaScript they can have avatars communicating and sharing locations with each other, its early days but I heard a lot of enthusiasm for the idea at the conference (no link yet but I think watch this space for news and to see other parts of the project)

Paper works so use Paper: In discussing getting students to understand the concept of the mid Atlantic ridge Heather Almquist described an activity where instead of getting students to use the new Cross section facility she got them instead to read off results and plot them on a piece of paper, 'they don't understand the concept of a cross section if you don't' (abstract). I've always advocated appropriate use of technology and this seemed a great example of not overusing technology.

Powers of 10: I've heard it said that an inspiration for Google Earth was the powers of 10 film

by Eames and Eames. I remember being mesmerised by it as a kid (blog post tribute), Ron Schott gave a keynote describing his use of Gigapan photography. I like gigapans but I was more impressed by a sequence where Ron presented a series of gigapan views each a subsection of the one before. It reminded me of the powers of 10 film and sparked an idea I might apply sometime in the future.

GEarth API Twins: Another of Ron's smart ideas was to put two instances of a GEarth API of the same view next to each other. This can be used to match geological strata as he showed or to render an overview of a region while the user flies into the second twin which he didn't. I can't find an example of showing geology but for an idea of what a 'twin' is this uses twins to show the antipodes of any location.

Into the Googleplex: Finally, it was fascinating to visit the Googleplex having heard so much about it (video tour). I expected to see the fun stuff but what hit you was the youth of almost everyone there, hardly a grey head to be seen and the perks of being a googler: fantastic free food, wifi enabled luxury buses taking you home and (the visual memory that is strongest for me) an infinity pool big enough for 2 googlers looked after by an attentive life guard under an umbrella in the early evening of a January day.

Penrose Conference Days 1 and 2

2011-01-07T05:44:00.003Z

So I meant to blog about the conference as I went along but I've found myself busy meeting up with lots of contacts and writing/editing my talk so I haven't found the time.

Day 1 Personal Highlights:

Declan De Paor and John Bailey welcomed us all, they and the rest of the organising team have put a ton of work into organising the event - John reckons he's written an average of 3 emails a day over the last year just about the conference.

Mano Marks talked about lots of new Geo things, the bit that most interested me was fusion tables and maps, I confess I've never understood what they're about but the key points to me about them are:

Cloud based and free
Built to handle lots of data
Limited spatial functionality now but more being built in the future
Can import shape files and export KML
You can build a web based interface with them so you could build a custom web page to query a given data set and visualize results on a map

Thanks to Christiaan Adams for helping explain them to me too.

Tina Ornduff described Google's approach to education. I think they are getting much more serious about it which is a welcome development.

Barb Tewksbury described using geological outcrops in arid countries to teach geological 3D interpretation, very smart. Paul Karabinos outlined using sketchup to teach 3D geology too.

Day 2 Personal Highlights:

I did the keynote on 'User First all else follows'. I've put slides and links on prezi but they won't make much sense if you weren't there as I haven't posted the videos and its designed for people who saw the talk. People have been very kind about what I was saying after the talk.

John Bailey and Sean Askey talked about creating tours, I was persuaded that tours generated from lines can be worth trying out.

Unfortunately I missed out on a number of talks and posters on day 2 as I was talking to colleagues about current/future projects.

Penrose Education Conference at the Googleplex

2011-01-04T17:31:00.003Z

Edit 5 Jan 11: removed link

I'm at a Google Earth in education conference at the Googleplex this week, my first time here (yes, the food is great). This is a Penrose conference so the emphasis is going to be on Geosciences rather than Geography.

I've already caught up with a lot of friends and we're about to kick off with Declan De Paor introducing the conference - sorry, the link I added is a closed site at the moment.

VGI in Education Talk

2010-12-14T17:23:00.003Z

I've done a talk discussing a project using VGI in teaching a first level Earth Science course:

I got students to use Google Earth but I explain how you could use Google My Maps as well. The feedback from the course was excellent so I thought it worth discussing how to set one up yourself.

Streetview now Captured by Tours

2010-12-08T10:52:00.004Z

I was away when GEarth v6 was released but I was excited to see the pegman make it into GEarth bringing the smooth usability of streetview in GMaps into GEarth.

Others have documented the feature well but no one in the blogosphere appears to have noticed (and isn't mentioned in the above clip) that you can now record streetview in tours too: tour of the walk from Waterloo Station to the London Eye. All you do is;

record a tour in the normal way,
drag and drop the pegman (orange man icon on the main screen controls) half way through to enter streetview
navigate around in streetview
click 'Exit Street View' button top left of your screen to exit street view
stop the tour.

to quote a famous meerkat: 'simples'

This has a ton of applications:

What better way to direct your friends to the pub?
Real estate (relators in US speak) adverts showing the town amenities close to their property
Teaching human geography

Well done Google, a smart feature all round.

Techy KML Details: GEarth 6 has spawned a new gx KML element: "gx:ViewerOptions", this element inserted into a FlyTo parent with"gx:option name="streetview"" tells GEarth to changes from normal to Streeview in the middle of a tour. ViewerOptions also allows historical imagery and sunlight conditions to be captured as well.

Blog Break and Infographics in the Media

2010-11-12T10:03:00.003Z

After slogging my way through the summer while all my colleagues took leave I'm about to take 3 weeks off myself to sort some things at home and holiday abroad. I haven't been posting much because of trying to kick a few projects into shape before leaving them for a while. I'll be back 2nd week of December.

I'll leave you with a fascinating set of videos I've found by Geoff McGee for a fellowship he completed at Stanford University. Its about data visualisation as a story telling medium and focusses on graphics in the media. What's interesting about it is the same problems I've noticed in using neo-geo tools in education and outreach come up in their topic area. Points that particularly resonate with me:

Martini Glass Presentation: The importance of an introduction, context setting and explanation of what you can 'do' with an interactive web graphic or complex print graphic (section III: Telling Data Stories). Without this, your creation is just a set of pretty colours to the user. The Martini glass stem represents the video clip slide presentation introduction and the triangular glass represents the freedom of the user to explore the graphic on their own.
Attractive Does Not = Effective: A beautiful looking stream graphic showing box office results for movies with time is discussed in part IV, various commentators point out that it grabs attention wonderfully but then is difficult to interpret what it shows.

Timelines and Tours outside Google Earth

2010-11-08T08:42:00.003Z

I've come across a couple of examples of GEarth features implemented elsewhere which were worth a mention:

Timeline Example: I thought this timeline from a New York Times graphic is much better than the timeline in Google Earth:

Easier to grab and move the jaws, in GEarth the jaws are too small
The play button only allows the jaws to move together, in GEarth you can press play and the far side of the jaws will move which is too complex for users to understand and utilise IMHO
The time labels are simple and clear whereas in GEarth the labels are more fussy
The blue shading communicates 'this is the time range' in a clear way and its semi transparent so you can see the graph below it.

The GEarth timeline remains high on my list of things Google should really fix in GEarth.

Tour Example: I think the tour feature of GEarth is one of its strongest features allowing user in presentations or promotional film clips. I came across a film sequence in a TED talk which has a form remarkably like a tour:

(BTW the clip is fascinating and well worth watching in full)

The clip 'zooms' down from large to small scale and at the destination scale the camera moves around a 3D object which is then manipulated in various ways to illustrate the relationships of neurons. Compare it with this GEarth tour:

The building clip has a poor frame rate and the building isn't manipulated in some way (like showing the inside rooms) but otherwise, the format is exactly the same. I'm in the middle of researching to best design tours at the moment and the Seung clip is a lovely illustration of how the results of my studies will not just apply to GEarth and other Virtual Globes but to any 3D visualisation system where zooming across scales in a film clip is important.

With the Seung clip I defined where it should start, see how to get a YouTube video to start where you want it.

Visualizing Motion

2010-10-27T08:51:00.002+01:00

Static and Dynamic Motion Viz: Timelines offer an excellent way to visualise motion of people or vehicles. I've discussed timelines in GEarth with a video illustration previously. Recently I've been hanging out at the GIS Stack forum which IMHO is an excellent resource. A recent question was on visualizing motion statically: what were the best techniques? What software could you use? I've pitched in with an answer along with some other contributors.

Static vs Dynamic: What doesn't come out in the discussion is would you choose a static option over the dynamic one if you had a choice? I think for the expert map reader (I'm thinking of a biologist tracking animal movement as an example) a static map has a number of advantages, it can be scanned quickly to find the point/time you are interested in and values of velocity are easy to read off. By comparison, an animation must be played to get to the point you want to view. As it can be printed it's also very portable.

For the bloke on the street, I think the dynamic version has most advantages: understanding the static version requires interpretation, the animation is instantly recognisable. Also, animations instantly attract the attention which is important for the public but not necessary for the expert.

Recording Tours via Screen Recorder

2010-10-20T22:43:00.003+01:00

I've lots of deadlines coming in at the moment so excuse the lack of posts last week.

Prior to the appearance of the tour feature of Google Earth in v5 I discussed recording a tour by using screen recorder Fraps. Recently Google Earth Blog has discussed a smart variation on this idea: set the fly to rate very slow and then deliberately speed up the movie in a movie editing package (see Be Travellers post). This gets over a major problem of recording a movie with screen capture straight from GEarth: the resulting movie loses the smoothness and looks 'choppy' (the technical term is to say the frame rate is low). Smart idea!

Here's the video example:

The HowTo write up Mike Griffin does is good but I have some suggestions (numbers in brackets refer to their step numbers):

Dialog box in the way (1): The way to deal with this is to simply drag the dialog box so most of it is off screen. Its not particularly elegant but it solves the issue.

Setting Viewpoints with Placemarks (2): as I suggest in this tutorial, if you choose your viewpoint before you create a viewpoint placemark its better because GEarth automatically sets the current view as the Placemark's view.

Manual Flights Clicking (4): The main problem with the technique Mike suggests to my mind is that you have to sit there manually clicking placemarks and then watching as GEarth flies from placemark to placemark incredibly slowly. This would drive me nuts for anything but the shortest tour.

If you can handle XML an alternative is to dive into the KML you've produced in setting up the placemark viewpoints to grab the Camera or LookAt data (in italics below) for each placemark.

<Placemark id="ElkRidge">
<name>Elk Ridge</name>
<description>shortly after the eruption</description>
<Camera>
<longitude>-122.2989801778228</longitude>
<latitude>46.29626193853221</latitude>
<altitude>13.39603579634948</altitude>
<heading>-31.06642935444568</heading>
<tilt>90.62346382665406</tilt>
<roll>-6.361109362927034e-014</roll>
<altitudeMode>relativeToGround</altitudeMode>
<gx:altitudeMode>relativeToSeaFloor</gx:altitudeMode>
</Camera>
<styleUrl>#msn_grn-blank1</styleUrl>
<Point>
<coordinates>-122.2993707244499,46.2969626924056,0</coordinates>
</Point>
</Placemark>

You can insert this data from each placemark into a FlyTo construction in a tour:

<gx:FlyTo>
<gx:duration>3</gx:duration>
<gx:flyToMode>smooth</gx:flyToMode>
<Camera>
...same data as above in here...
</Camera>
</gx:FlyTo>

using a series of these will give you a tour and you can edit the duration tags to alter the speed of flight from placemark to placemark. When you're happy with how the tour looks you go back through the tour KML resetting each duration to be x10 what it was previously. Now you can set the screen recording going as Mike suggests, run your incredibly slow tour and let the computer do the work recording it while you go and have some lunch.

Other Advantages: Recording tours as videos rather than as tours in GEarth has other advantages: you can access all the features of the movie software you use (such as fade in transitions) which aren't available in Google Earth. As time goes on I expect Google will add more features to tours.

Maps and Art

2010-10-07T17:08:00.003+01:00

There is an intriguing outbreak of using maps in art in the blogosphere;

The above image is of the English channel and is from the intriguing Fata Morgana which, using the latest feature in the Google Maps API has taken away everything but the words (and in the UK, what words! 'Hougham Without' in the middle of the image sounds lovely).

Axis maps release a set of posters working on a similar idea but putting a ton more cartographic love into their work.

Via Ogle Earth I found a wonderful reflective essay on the juxtaposition effects of imagery from different times: HiLoBrow.

And finally, Evert Schut finds inspiration in the many and varied patterns Google Earth produces at Google Earth Art.

W3G Conference - like Geography only cooler

2010-09-29T10:18:00.005+01:00

(Title of this post ripped and mixed from @DJSoup tweet)

A quick post on yesterday's W3G conference, I had a great time, there was a fantastic mix of NeoGeos, GISers and all kinds of other geo-philes kicking around ideas in a conference/

unconference format.

Highlights for me included:

Steve Feldman's fantastic rant (blogged here and here) about data that shouldn't be mapped. His line was that mapping some data doesn't do it any favours because a] it doesn't tell you anything worth knowing b] its misleading. He identified some twitter maps as culprit, like this map of tweets about the Gulf Oil Spill, I agree with him that this one doesn't pass the 'does mapping this add anything to understanding?' test.

Peter Batty's comments in his unconference slot about usability. As I said in my slot, I have been advocating Krug's 'Don't make me think' book and usability testing to all sorts of groups for years so it was excellent to see someone else making much the same points.

I also met Stuart and colleague from Geo.me who have a very impressive engine for fast production of bespoke maps. Well worth a look.

I gave a talk on techniques of clustering points mostly and expansion on this post. I think I misjudged the crowd with my approach but geo.me and Nick Bicanic made some interesting counter points to my argument so it was worth doing.

This was my first unconference and NeoGeo event, its noticeably a lot less stuffy than more mainstream conferences I go to which is great. Thanks to everyone who put it together.

Cartography of Base Maps

2010-09-23T11:18:00.005+01:00

updated 1 Oct to attribute the quote correctly

There's been an interesting cartographic discussion of base maps recently in the geo-blogosphere; Stamen Design blogged some notes about their work on Bing maps, which was picked up by 41Latitude which was in turn highlighted by James Fee. The point that comes out from this, as Justin O'Beirne says, is that

"in trying to make a base map that’s optimized for everything, we’re actually creating one that’s optimized for nothing."

Which I heartily agree with. An example is street names, if you are producing a map for city navigation street names are vital but if your map is a thematic one showing a heat map of crimes per square km, street names aren't important and should be removed. 41Latitude suggests having a range of base maps for different uses, this is sensible but of course you can go one step further: The new Google maps API allows you to customise the base map and of course, if you start with a really basic base map (say land and sea) of any service you can always produce a custom base map by adding specific layers (e.g. roads) as you see fit.

How Many Users: What no one so far has mentioned is that how much you customise a base map is really controlled by how much effort you want to put in. In turn, that is usually a factor of how many users you have and how complex your map is.

sketch map courtesy Rosanne Elkins-Bushnell

At one end of the scale, the proverbial 'back of an envelope' map has as its base map the envelope and works fine for a sketch of how to find a coffee shop for one person on a street. Showing a group of people the location of the hotel you're all meeting at works pretty well as a marker on a street map; my maps by google would be fine for this as the data can be displayed as a simple map. However, once you start having multiple layers with markers or polygons you really want to start thinking about improving your base map as screen clutter and usability becomes a real issue, especially if your map service is going to be used by many users and a client is paying you to put it together. You want to choose from a series of base maps to get the optimal base map or even customise it for your particular use.

10 Myth Busting Facts about Google Earth

2010-09-15T10:36:00.004+01:00

Back from my trip to America now, whilst out there I met up with colleagues who also train teachers and students in using GEarth. Over beers a topic that often came up was misconceptions about Google Earth from those with no GIS or Google Earth experience, so I've put together my personal list of myth busting facts. They're in rough descending order of importance:

1] You can make your own map in GEarth. You can add points, lines or areas to Google Earth marking anything you want. Tutorial.

2] Google Earth isn't just satellite images and roads. There are lots of sets of data (called 'layers' because they are like a layer of see through plastic that can be turned on or off at will) you can look at draped over the background imagery of Google Earth. Examples include ; weather, Panoramio photos and shipwreck locations (Layers > Ocean > Shipwrecks) . Some of these layers come on automatically when you use Google Earth, you can turn layers on or off in the layers column as you wish. To cut down screen clutter I usually turn everything off apart from terrain.

3] Any map you make in Google Earth is not visible to anyone else unless you publish it. Just because you write a document in Microsoft Word it doesn't mean Microsoft can see it, it's exactly the same with anything you create in Google Earth. Background elements such as satellite images, roads and town names provided by Google are visible to all but add elements to Google Earth yourself and only you can see them.

4] You can publish your own map without going through Google. The layers column (bottom left of the screen in Google Earth) is a selection of materials that Google think lots of people will find useful but if you want to publish your own map by emailing it to people, or putting it on your web page you can just do it without checking with Google first.

5] The satellite data in Google Earth is historic, i.e. its not imagery taken today. Usually its a pretty recent image taken in the last 3 years.

6] Google does not censor satellite imagery. I can't say this for certain but stories appearing about Google censorship in the press are usually a misunderstanding based on age of imagery or the fact that Google buys a lot of its images from other agencies who may be doing the censorship themselves. See this post for details.

7] You can use Google Earth offline. Google Earth stores the satellite images of areas you visit on your hard drive in a special folder called a cache. If you've visited London in Google Earth you can then disconnect from the web and use Google Earth to look at London some more. Google Earth will do this by loading the images back in from the cache. If you then fly to Paris and zoom in Google Earth will just show you a fuzzy mess because it can't download the new imagery to produce Paris on screen until you connect up to the web again. This is very useful for presentations using Google Earth at conferences where you can't rely on wifi.

8] You can tilt the view to see mountains in 3D. A couple of years ago it was a common misconception that Google Earth was just 2D, many users didn't know you couldn't tilt the camera view and see the landscape in 3D. I'm not sure its such a common misunderstanding any more.

How To: tick the terrain layer in the layers column if you can see one, if you can't, don't worry. Hold the shift key down and use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to tilt .

9] Google Earth is not a security threat. Lots of scare stories have gone around about terrorists using Google Earth to plan attacks or thieves using it to set up robberies and that Google Earth should therefore be turned off or censored (see 6 above). It may be true that Google Earth is a tool for enemies of society but there are two main arguments against censoring Google Earth; firstly, satellite imagery has been available for sale to all comers for years before the appearance of Google Earth - if your security system relies on people not being able to see dated satellite imagery of your house, military instillation or city then it's never been very good security. Secondly, cars, mobile phones and pens are all used by terrorists and thieves, are we going to ban them too?

10] You can use Google Earth to explore other Planets, the Sky and History. Google Earth has lots of other features people users are usually unaware of, for example, you can use it to explore the surface of Mars, the Moon and the night sky. It also can be used to show historic imagery.

3D Geology Models

2010-09-09T20:36:00.006+01:00

I'm in Norfolk, Virginia working with Declan de Paor and team at Old Dominion University this week. I've already had a fascinating time looking at their latest work (see an old post for more details of the type of thing Declan does). An example is a model of the earth below Iceland, screen shot below.

Source files here

The great thing about this project is that unlike most TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) projects I've been involved in, the team here have a lot of technical examples working already and we're just starting! A lot of TEL projects start with a teaching idea without knowing how to produce it technically which means that little or no time is left to find out if the learning technology works as the team's time is absorbed in solving technical problems. So I think this project is really going to produce some excellent materials and push forward the use of Google Earth in education.

Google Earth API Use: One thing Declan's team are doing that I think is really clever is that they're using the GEarth API to reduce complication. Instead of having lots of controls like the compass control and layers panel in the GEarth client, they use the GEarth API showing only the controls that they need which simplifies the tool for students. Unfortunately they haven't published any examples yet but I'll point them out when they appear.

Google Earth for Scale: Colossus of Endlesham Road

2010-09-01T09:28:00.005+01:00

I really like howbigreally.com, a project by the BBC using google maps to illustrate the scale of things e.g. it puts the Apollo 11 moon walk into your local park.

The idea of sticking the statue of liberty or Nelson's column into a figure to show scale is nothing new and is something I do myself in Google Earth, e.g. UK outline vs Gulf oil spill . What's clever about howbigreally is the use of Google maps as a backdrop and some excellent choices of topics to illustrate.

Their examples are all of lengths and areas though, to illustrate the size of the statue of Colossus they show the statue's footprints. It made me think, this would work with 3D topics such as giant statues if it was done in Google Earth with sketchup models. I experimented and the rough and ready result is below:

The (Large 2 Mb) Google Earth file: Colussus

Putting a model in Google Earth to scale wasn't difficult but around where I live, the buildings aren't modelled in 3D so I combined a screenshot of the model in Google Earth with streetview imagery to show the statue in place.

HowTo:

1] Look up Colussus in the sketchup warehouse, (the one I use is courtesy of Goldie). If the model isn't in KMZ format already, load it into sketchup then export to Google Earth (HowTo). Obviously you can put any sketchup model in place, not just Colussus.

2] Once in Google Earth find the size of your model (I looked up Colussus on wikipedia), in this case I knew his height so I produced a placemark and gave it an altitude (in the edit Placemark box > Altitude tab > Relative to Ground (pull down menu), enter height in Altitude box and tick extend to ground box).

3] Right click the model in the places column and click properties. Move the camera until its looking down on the model, you can drag the green box corners, sides and central cross which will alter the size and position of the model. Do so until it matches the height of your placemark and is in the right position.

4] In the properties as above use the green diamond to rotate the model to the correct position.

Automating: Just as howbigreally automates areas and lengths against Google Maps, it would be possible to automate the position of a model like this in Google Earth and produce an automatic tour around it too.

Personal Website Update

2010-08-26T16:57:00.004+01:00

Following yesterday's post, I thought I should get started updating my personal website. It was surprisingly quick and easy, I'm all done!

I've added items to the publication, project, lesson plan and tutorial sections that weren't listed before (if you've followed this blog, I've discussed most of them here). I've also fixed broken links and generally had a good old tidy up. Very satisfying!

Current Projects: Haiti, Tours, Education and China

2010-08-25T10:24:00.005+01:00

This summer has been very busy so I haven't got around to updating projects on my personal web pages. There are a number of projects that I'm working on at the moment that aren't listed and deserve a mention:

Haiti Maps Usability: I am supervising Luke Caley an MSc project student looking at usability of maps in the Haiti earthquake disaster, Luke is talking to people who where there at the early stages of the disaster investigating how maps and mapping were used in the field. There is a related area about the usability of crowd sourced map systems that is fascinating but unfortunately beyond the scope of this study.

Our theory is that Aid workers are a group for whom map usability is critical: when you publish a map on the web user's are only ever a click away from watching cats falling off sofas on YouTube. In an emergency situation the attention of aid workers is even worse - trying to figure out your map is time they could be using to pull people out from under collapsed buildings. So far the interviews seem to be showing that our theory is basically correct. Lots of organisations are generously giving time to helping us, for example ImageCat and MapAction. Final results are due in this autumn.

Google Earth Tour Research: Research is continuing into defining best practices for using tours in virtual globes (see 58:12 into this video for my talk on earlier work). Our results will apply to any virtual globe but for this study we've chosen to use Google Earth. Our main areas of investigation are into seeing how speed of flight and path geometry in tours affect the user's ability to track where they are within Google Earth. The video clip below illustrates the effect tour path has on user understanding, keeping track of where you are is easier on the outbound flight than on the return inbound leg:

User testing on students is planned for September and the results will be used in teaching materials. These materials will support students who will produce their own tours as part of a Southampton University GIS course. The study is funded by GEES.

Usability of Google Earth Materials in Education: I'm working with Declan De Paor from Old Dominion University and others on an NSF funded educational project where I'm providing input on usability issues. It's very early days on this project but Declan's examples give a good taste of what we're going to get up to.

China: I'm also off to China working with John Dearing and others where I'll be using Google Earth to communicate with Chinese farmers helping to alleviate poverty. Again, the project has yet to really kick off.

Next year is looking busy but exciting!

(update 26 Aug: Corrected Declan's surname spelling mistake)

Global Warming Map - Review pt II

2010-08-18T12:22:00.004+01:00

continued from Part I last week...

Layer Control: The plugin version has no layer control available to control the individual impact layers (you can turn them on and off as a group) so you can't get around the multiple areas problem I outline above. You can control impact layers in the GEarth file but it's confusing:

there are 6 levels of folders and way too many elements in this folder view. It could be a lot simpler which would improve usability.

Non-Spatial Data and Closing Balloons: In the above screenshot you can see a folder titled 'background information' is provided. It's non-spatial data so it shouldn't be in GEarth at all - better to link to a set of web pages elsewhere showing the same information and avoid cluttering up the GEarth layers panel.

While I'm talking about 'Background info' its sub-folders (even though they don't have a folder icon, that's what they are) have pop up balloons with a black background so you can't see where to click the cross to close the balloon.

Poor Balloon Design: There are a number of issues with the pop up balloons;

Information Density: IMHO balloons are there to hold extra information (including images or videos) that cannot be presented easily as a traditional map symbol/key system. If you read the actual text in the forest fire example below the information you are actually getting is: 'high forest fire danger projected to affect every populated continent'. Unnecessarily it then tells you where the areas are that are affected - this is a map, that's what the polygons are communicating, no need to say it again in text. So there's little new information in the balloon, it's interesting to compare with the amount of data you get in placemark balloons in the Dafur project

Large Fonts: The top design is from the Impacts section in the GEarth plugin, the font is way too large decreasing the total amount of text that can be put in the balloon. Its less of an issue in the GEarth file with the text more reasonably proportioned, I suspected someone re-used the KML in the main file in the plugin without customising it to this different presentation. Kirsty confirms that this was so and says that she asked for the large font size to 'give more prominence to the headline messages we were communicating with this map'. My answer is that with smaller fonts you can add extra detail towards the bottom of a balloon without forcing the user to click a link, users will close a balloon happily when they've read enough information. Again, the Dafur project is a good example.

Lack of Design Coherence: The two balloons from two different sections also don't marry visually, as can be seen above. This isn't good graphical design, you should have a consistent look across a project (e.g. across all pages of bbc.co.uk). Kirsty explains that this is because the data comes from two different organisations (the Foreign Office and the Met Office) who do very different things (act on science, research science respectively). Kirsty says this difference needs to be 'absolutely clear[in the mind of the user]'. I can understand that need but if the difference is so important, why isn't it explained anywhere and why do the different data sets share a map in the first place?

Placemarks in Placemarks: In Google Earth opening 'FCO Climate Change' folder and then clicking the Spanish placemark you get an Inception-esque Google map within a GEarth map as captured in the screenshot below. Bizarrely you can open placemarks within a placemark leading to visual confusion.

Temperature Map Key: The temperature map overlay just about works in the original map as there is a key showing what the colors mean. However, in the GEarth file the key has become too small to read (its not available in the plugin). Most users will guess the heat colours corresponding to hot and cool temperatures but a readable key adds value.

Temperature Map Contours: The temperature map has heat contours on it out in the sea. These aren't labelled and I would predict that most users won't know what they are so it ends up just cluttering up the view.

Down-under Problem: I mentioned the fact you can't compare Australia and the UK at the same time in a virtual globe in the skim review.

Talking Heads: The project links to video clips of experts talking about their specialisms within the topic area, they're presented as talking head with no visual aids. Compare the style with a trailer from Wonders of the Solar system (one of the most successful science series the BBC has had)

Unless you are an exceptionally talented speaker (I'm certainly not) it's very difficult to maintain a user's attention as a talking head. Notice in the second clip that you never see Brian Cox against a static studio screen, the BBC are always trying to help the viewer visualise the point he's making by putting him on location or providing a visualisation.

You don't need a large travel and/or CGI budget to achieve this sort visual interest as I hope I showed in my latest climate change talk using GEarth as my main visualisation tool.

Kirsty comments that "they just wanted scientists to appear as the ordinary people they are", that's an understandable aim but I don't think it relates to the 'visual aids' point I've made.

Conclusion:

This is not a failure as a project, I think its main positive is that the 'what happens with 4 deg warming' approach is a great choice to communicate climate science to the public. However, if the design had been thought through more it could have been a lot better.

I wasn't a huge fan of the original map version of this project (e.g it had the same area problem) but it was OK. The vast majority of the issues I raise here have been introduced by moving the content to GEarth without thinking through what the pros and cons are of GEarth client/plugin as a presentation tool.

In relation to the above paragraph, Kirsty asks "This is the key point. The question is really, can GEarth be used to successfully display this map? ... ...the challenge we had was to present an existing map, already well-known, in the GEarth format". My answer is that no, GEarth is not the best choice of medium if the data (as in this case) relates to inter-continental scales because of the downunder problem. I may elaborate in the future on what IMHO GEarth is best at.

Global Warming Map - Review ptI

2010-08-13T10:20:00.004+01:00

This is the first half of a two part review.

I did a skim review last month of the Foreign office's recent Google Earth project showing the effect of 4 degrees average temperature rise. In short, its a great topic to work with but they could have done much better in terms of geoweb usability.

Background
The project was originally produced as a 2D map which has been transferred to a Google Earth plugin and GEarth file presentation with more data. Click on the image to get to the original

I'll be reviewing the presentation in the GEarth plugin (visible on the main page) and the theGEarth file which is linked to from the main page.

I've been in contact with the Kirsty Lewis the project manager (I'm not certain of her exact role) who's commented on a draft of this review.

Press: Its got a lot of press attention e.g. this piece on channel 4 news.

Review Pros

Icons: The 'Impacts' icons (round and multi-colored) are clear, clean and use good symbols so the user can guess what they represent before actually clicking them. I like the use of color as well, by choosing less intense colors they've allow differentiation between impact layers without being overpowering.

Topic: Climate change is a global problem so Google Earth represents a good choice of medium. I especially like the overarching approach they've taken: 'what will be the effect of a 4 degree rise in global average temperature', because certainly here in the UK with our damp, cold winters a 4 degree rise in average temperature seems attractive if you think of it only in a shallow manner.

Acronyms and Jargon: Throughout the project both videos and maps, they steer clear of science acronyms and jargon which is good to see in a science communication project.

Review Cons

Use Points not Areas: The project marks areas with a colored ring and provides an icon of the same color nearby that can be clicked for more information. Thus we click a tap icon to find out that droughts in southern Europe are becoming more common. It would be better to give specific examples of droughts at several points as you could have then involved photos and a human scale story of the global problem. E.g. show a photo of a Farmer in Spain with dry soil running through his fingers and a personal story about how his farm is being affected.

Kirsty commented that she thought that this 'specific location' approach would lead to users incorrectly thinking that climate change is completely to blame for specific problems and that explaining the concepts would be complex and unwieldy. I see her point with this, climate change is often one of a number of factors producing a problem such as arid farms and climate change actually affects the probability of drought in a given area, it's incorrect to say it produces droughts. However, I think you could add caveats that would work around these issues without overloading the content - I explain the issues to 14 year old students in 5 minutes using a betting analogy.

Multiple Areas at the same time: Another problem with the area approach is that its confusing to show multiple overlapping areas at the same time as can be seen in this screen shot of the GEarth plugin version:

There are multiple solutions to this confusing view, e.g. annotate areas with a color fill and white border and allow only one layer at a time to be viewed, I've produced a mock up below:

of course, it's easier still to use points instead of areas as I recommend above.

Kirsty's answer to this is that the circles make the point that areas are overlapping. That's a fair point but you need to make it less visually complex when first viewed by a user. The circles would work better if they were introduced added one by one in a GEarth tour with an audio narrative (a concept I explore in in a book chapter).

She also thinks that its important that the GEarth presentation is visually similar to the original map so people understand the links between the projects and that removing the circles would severe that link. I think she's correct that branding is important but that doesn't mean you have to re-use all the details - just keeping the icons set is enough to link the GEarth and Map presentations in the user's mind.

second half next week...

Back Button, Places Column Tip

2010-08-04T15:08:00.006+01:00

Back Button: As I move around in GEarth, GMaps and other mapping systems it occurred to me that I'd really like to have a back button to fly me back to the last view or back to the last placemark I looked at similar to the way a browser back button takes you back to the last page. You could have a whole history recorded like a GEarth tour which you could replay until you found the location you wanted.

Places Column Tip: There are 3 parts to the element listing in the GEarth places column which can be clicked with different effects. I use this most times I have GEarth open.

Data.gov GEO Viewer Fail

2010-08-02T14:42:00.003+01:00

Via James Fee I picked up on the new Data.gov GEO Viewer. I couldn't get it to work either. Marten Hogweg reviews it and it's worth reading the comments: webotter picks out problems with the UI of the viewer.

Next Climate Change Talk

2010-07-29T15:43:00.004+01:00

Here's the latest release from a series of climate change talks I'm doing, this one discusses the Gulf Oil spill, the Athabasca Oil Sands and climate change:

Unlike the earlier 'Is the Earth a Super Organism' talk I've released so far in this series, this one is completely based in GEarth. It's 10th in the series but I've released it early as:

The spill is still ongoing
I wanted to have a go at a talk completely in Google Earth to showcase my ideas of what a well designed tour should be like.

I've made a Prezi to link to other resources beyond the scope of the talk:

Gulf Oil Spill and Oil Sands on Prezi

Good Design Points: A few reasons I think this is a well designed tour:

The tour covers views across a range of scales, this is where a tour really beats a traditional PowerPoint presentation
Simple Flights: The flights between segments are simple and fairly slow to give users chance to process the movement and work out where they are being taken.
Scale: I included Nelson's column, the outline of Great Britain (twice) and a 5 mile long at various points to fix a sense of scale. GEarth is very good at helping users grasp the scale of things.
Annotations: I use lots of annotations to draw the user's eye to the correct part of the screen.
Dateline: Because the inbuilt GEarth dateline is too small I included a custom dateline indicator.

Things I'd like to fix:

Dateline is too small: I fell into the classic trap of looking at GEarth on a large screen then reducing down to a 640 wide movie clip - you can't read the text easily.
Audio Hiccups: There are a few audio hiccups that I'd like to fix but these aren't easy in Camtasia without affecting the video. I've got to get a better mic too....
Better Images: There are a ton of better images I'd have liked to have used but I haven't got the time to ask permission. Every image used is cc marked and that limits choice.

Work Flow: To produce it I imported models, images, overlays etc. into GEarth then I recorded a tour visiting all the locations as I wanted. Using the pro version of GEarth, I then recorded a silent movie of the tour which I imported into Camtasia. Within Camtasia I added the audio section by section, using freeze frames to extend the movie where needed and cutting footage to fit the commentary. I also added 'call outs' the red annotations which work in addition to annotations I've added in Google Earth. Its not an elegant technique but it avoids issues to do with GEarth tours such as not being able to review changes easily and needing to edit kml code rather than use the Camtasia graphic interface.

12 Neo-Cartographic Tips for Developers

2010-07-23T17:49:00.007+01:00

After releasing the Google Maps API styling features Googler Mano Marks commented:

"The truth is, we're mostly engineers, not cartographers. I'd love to see some great guides to how to style your map. Anyone want to give it a go?"

So here are my 12 best neo-cartographic tips:

Tips 1 to 6 (9.30)

Tips 7 to 12 (6.10)

Links out: There are various links out and other text and relationships shown in the clip, to access them you can navigate in the Prezi pane:

Cartography for NeoGeo Developers on Prezi

Other Notes:

Not Just Cartography: Mano's request was asking about the new style features. Actually only 2 of the tips [5 and 6] relate to the new feature because IMHO a holistic approach to map design is necessary so you have to consider usability, graphic design and interactivity as well.
Not Just for Developers: I aimed the material at developers but its a good introduction to design for anyone thinking of putting an interactive map together because I don't use any jargon.
Discussion of Styling: My post discussing the lack of cartographic advice that went with the styling feature release. Ed Parson's post is also relevant.

Global Warming Map from Foreign Office

2010-07-16T09:40:00.006+01:00

This GEarth layer and GEarth plugin has been released this week by the foriegn office showing the effects of 4 deg C rise in tempearature on the world. Great topic but poor science communication IMHO. For example, in an earlier incarnation it was a map (click the screen shot to be taken to the map):

In this form you could click layers on and off at the bottom and see all the countries in the world at once. In the GEarth plugin version, countries are obscured by the curvature of the earth and there's no layer control so you're left with a cluttered mess of circles and ovals all on screen at the same time.

I'm going to review it more fully next week when I have more time, there are a number of other interesting design features to the project.

Google Earth 5.2 Thoughts

2010-07-13T11:08:00.004+01:00

Sorry for lack of posts last week, my family is over from New Zealand so I took some time out.

GE 5.2 has already been reviewed well by Mickey and Stephan, I share their enthusiasm for the tracks, elevantion and slide in browser functionality. I've noticed some other features in the 5.2 Pro version (not sure if they're in the normal version) that IMHO deserve comment:

Table: (Tools > Table) This gives you a table view of the KML that you've selected in the places column so you can see the text in the description boxes of a number of placemarks at once, its similar in functionality to Northgates KML editor. Table isn't documented anywhere I can find and I was disappointed to find its read only, it really would be useful if you could use it to write to KML directly as per GIS tools and the Northgates tool.

GE gives you the ability to produce KML within the editor already but I'd love to see functionality where I could put time tags into KML without having to copy raw KML out to a text file.

Regionate: This is documented to a degree but it didn't tell me exactly what this functionaility does, e.g. it doesn't chop up paths into smaller segments. Maybe it only deals with placemarks?

I was also excited to see a contextual help button in the dialogue box. Contextual help in GE is something I've advocated before so I was disappointed to find its only in the Regionate and flight simulator dialogue box (given a cursory hunt around). Why not link to help files from all dialogue boxes?

Slide in Browser: Stephan makes a nice point about the slide in browser, I agree with him that maintaining the option of the split screen would be good. However, I think that the sliding browser screen would be excellent for using GE in presentations, set up a tour, fly into an area in GE then pan across a presentation slide in a browser from the web, use that to support your talk for a while then return to GE to continue the tour. I think Google should think about linking the Google Docs presentation tool with Google Earth in this way, I played around with the idea but currently:

It takes 2 clicks to open a presentation (open balloon, select link)
Opening a GDocs presentation in the GE browser currently crashes GE pro!

Polygons and Ruler: I was pleased to see that the polygon bug has been fixed, that was a real pain. Being able to save paths produced with the ruler tool is also smart.

Climate Change Talks

2010-07-02T11:17:00.010+01:00

Previously I've enjoyed releasing something good on GoogleEarthDesign's birthday (It was 3 this week) so here's my latest big idea:

Climate Change Talks: A quick search of the internets revealed no one has done a set of video clips on climate change for education (apart from illegal snippets of 'an inconvenient truth') so I decided to do some. Some of the later ones are matched to the UK A level Edexcel curriculum. Here's the first one on the topic 'Is the Earth a Super Organism'.

It's better viewed in HD

Format: Climate change as a topic requires discussing abstract ideas such as positive and negative feedback as well as map based graphics so I went for Prezi.com as an alternative to PowerPoint and added clips of GEarth tours where useful. When a lot of your presentation isn't actually spatial its better not to base your content totally in a GEarth tour as it presents difficulties. E.g. importing, sizing and adding labels to an image in Prezi is a snap with lots of drag and drop controls whereas its a pain to do as an image overlay in GEarth.

Having said that, some of the other clips I have planned which are completely spatial in nature will be done just as GEarth tours and recorded as YouTube clips.

Here is the original prezi page:

(navigate by using the plus minus buttons that will slide out if you mouse over the right hand side or use mouse wheel and click and drag)

Climate Change 1: Is the Earth Alive? on Prezi

It's rather like viewing a GEarth file after watching a tour of the content. In the bottom left corner of each frame it has links to related topics that don't feature in the talk.

Death to PowerPoint: Lots of people have criticised PowerPoint for its slide analogy format, I think you can still do some useful stuff with it but I see their point. The nice thing about Prezi is that I can produce a mind map like poster and then take you around with added audio by recording it with demo software (I use Camtasia 7).

Pros:

I like the zoomable interface idea Prezi shares with GEarth tours
Prezi is very usable and Camtasia is not bad
Doing it this way I like the way I can be discussing one set of points but adding arrows to link back to earlier slides of content.

Cons:

Using 3 bits of software is a drag (GEarth, Prezi and Camtasia 7) and is time consuming
I don't like the way Prezi.com promotes the idea of rotating text all over the place, I've heard reports it makes people feel sick.

Video Clips in Education: I had a long think about how to present this content and I thought it worth listing my inspirations:

Hans Rosling: Excellent speaker with great use of technology
Lawrence Lessig: Great speaker, interesting and unique style but I'm not sure I like how linear it is.
Ken Robinson: Amazing, totally absorbing using just his voice. Good to remember that technology is not what makes a great talk, its the talk itself and the speaker.

Very interested to hear what people think.

on Blogging and Tweeting

2010-06-24T14:20:00.003+01:00

This blog is coming up to 3 years old so I'm trying to make time to do some reflecting on the work to date. Today I thought I'd talk about why I'm still doing this after 3 years:

Lost Decade of GeoWeb Usability: A while back I compared the progress of GeoWeb usability with the history of web usability. Jakob Nielsen described the first ten years of the web as the lost decade where web design was awful and no one seemed to care. Whilst there are encouraging signs of an understanding of what makes great GeoWeb content (Axis Maps, Stamen Design, New York Times: example ) there is much more out there that is badly thought out IMHO. So I'm still here advocating good GeoWeb design.

Blog as Outward Facing Notebook: When I first started this blog I had grand ideas of getting lots of useful feedback based on the long lists of comments I was seeing on some other blogs. I don't get as much feedback as I expected and I now realise that its a power law relationship - a few blogs get the majority of the attention with lots of comments whilst the rump of bloggers get a loyal core following but less feedback.

However, this hasn't put me off the process, I actually blog because its a great way of forcing myself to keep decent notes on all kinds of map related stuff. The fact that I can turn it outwards and share these ideas with a larger community has some benefits but is mostly just a bonus, its use for me is mostly as a personal index which I search for something most days I'm online. I recently found I share this view of blogging with John Naughton, one of my favourite web/internet gurus.

Tweeting: As for tweeting, my motivation is much the same. I treat it as a micro-blog where I post all the links I may find useful in the future but don't have time to write up properly as a blog post.

Hits: The final bonus of blog keeping is seeing the hits, I've found it fascinating what people are interested in on my blog.

Blog New Look!

2010-06-16T10:44:00.002+01:00

The blog has a new look from today, hope you like it!

Forgotten Spaces Google Earth Tour

2010-06-16T09:31:00.005+01:00

Forgotten Spaces is an architectural competition that suggests new uses for the forgotten spaces around London. As a Londoner and appreciater of architecture it caught my imagination and I went to see an exhibition about it over the weekend at the National Theatre.

I enjoyed it but was frustrated by the lack of a decent overview map both in the exhibition and on the web: I wanted to see about what the neighbourhoods were like around the locations. It occurred to me that they could have used Google Earth really well in presenting the competition so I created a Google Earth tour of three of the entries to illustrate the idea.

It isn't very slick as I'm short on time but I think its good enough to shows some ideas that I discuss below:

A few points to make about the tour:

Quick!:Whole thing took me 2 hours, including a fair amount of time spent locating where the spaces were. In a day I could create something slick looking.
Streetview: You can get streetview in Google earth (they have their own layer), by copying the photo spheres into the tour folder you can incorporate them in the tour as I have. Gives you great local context.
Viewing Elements: I imported the photos into Google Earth as photo overlays - you just drag and drop them from windows explorer into the main GE window. Its very quick but you cannot enter the viewing mode in the tour which is a pain, same with the streetview photo spheres. On a tour you can pause the tour and double click the elements and you'll be able to enter photo viewing mode, have a go to see what I mean.
Avoiding Cyber Sickness: If you throw the camera about wildly its possible to induce cyber sickness in viewers and even if you don't do that, wild camera moves confuse users, they don't know where they are. You can see that I tend to zoom and pan in and out whilst keeping the view north-top vertically-down. If I want a tilted view with a non north bearing I do that when zoomed right it, trying to keep the relevant screen elements in view as I do so. Zooming out, I straighten up the view before zooming out.
Overview Map/relative locations: To help users build up a cognitive map of where all the elements are (so they can effectively explore afterwards) I start and end with an overview of all the locations and between locations fly up to this overview. When panning from place to place I keep elements in view so users can get an idea of their relative locations.

This post is unofficial and not condoned by RIBA, I have used their copyright images for educational purposes and also as a critique of the web presentation of Forgotten Spaces.

Cloud GIS: Indiemapper review

2010-06-09T09:40:00.004+01:00

Update 12/6: I spelt Indiemapper wrongly as Indemapper which I've now corrected. Thanks for the heads up Maarten.

Introduction: Indiemapper is an online GIS from Axis maps, it compares with services like GeoCommons (my GeoCommons review) and the newly released ArcGIS Explorer online (James Fee's review).

I was really excited to dive in and experiment with it as it promised to enable good map design practices. Sure, you can still make ugly maps with it if you try hard but the defaults will nudge (in the sense of this nudge book) you to make good design decisions and contextual help is there to inform you of good design practice. No one will be surprised to hear I think this idea is a Very. Good. Thing.

I discussed Indemapper with Mark Harrower on a conference call before writing this review.

Pros:

Good Map Design as Default: By integrating colorbrewer and typebrewer into the package and providing design advice in contextual help they've produced an app that promotes good design. Yay!
Cloud Based: This is aimed at people who don't need the full power of desktop GIS and its a cloud based service so you can access you work from any computer.
Group Working: Is also possible and I can see lots of potential for this.
Contextual help: As well as supporting good design, contextual help is a real usability plus - instead of having to waste time finding the help section that deals with your particular problem, a contextual help button takes you straight to what you need.
Integration with PhotoShop: Axis maps have made a point of making it easy to export from Indemapper into other software such as photoshop.

Sort of Neutral:

Projections: Indemapper is promoted as being good at handling projections. I can see where Axis is coming from about this but I don't think projections are as important as they make out.

Cons:

No User Manual (yet): Mark explained to me that one of the audiences they had in mind for Indiemapper was for people not expert in GIS who don't need full GIS functionality. For those people the GIS like interface is intimidating, they really need a set of step by step tutorials on howto make a map with Indiemapper. Contextual help just doesn't fill the need properly. Mark said they had a series of video tutorials planned covering this.
Free for Educational Users: All Unis I know will have GIS teaching materials authored for Arc. IMHO to persuade a tutor to switch to Indiemapper for teaching the educational licence cost has to be zero and at the moment, its just a reduction. Both ArcGIS Explorer online and GeoCommons are both free.
Desert Fog on Startup: When first opened Indiemapper has a blank screen. For users who have been making maps in NeoGeo tools like Google Earth or Google Maps, they will be confused and a little intimidated that there isn't a base layer visible. Better to have a default layer visible that users can change than a blank, desert fog screen.
Static Maps only: Indiemapper isn't designed to produce interactive maps. Mark said this was something they would consider in the future. I agree with him that there's a ton of applications for static maps but I'd like to see some simple interactions possible - clickable pop up balloons with simple html would do.
GIS Metaphor: Indiemapper works on a GIS metaphor in that a database is linked to a map. If you open a few layers and click on a point you will pull up the normal GIS attribute table. This is second nature to anyone who's worked GIS but newbie map makers will be confused, attribute tables and how it links to a map are quite a complex concept to understand and manipulate. Mark explained to me that the design team spent time discussing if there was a better way to organise a map than layers. I agree with their decision to use layers as the way to organise the map, I can't see a way around that, but I think they could have adopted an interface where data is still arranged in layers but the underlying data structure (XML as it happens) is hidden from the users view by simple screen interactions. Google Earth operates in this way, you don't get to see the KML with simple main screen operations.

Unlike my other criticisms, altering the GIS metaphor is probably a big structural change, so I doubt its worth implementing. That's OK so long as they make sure the issue is well covered in the video tutorials.

When Indiemapper is supported by video tutorials and able to produce simple interactions it's a tool I'd definitely consider for my teaching and for producing my own maps.

Google Earth Tours in Geog. Teaching III

2010-06-02T11:09:00.002+01:00

This is a 3rd of a 3 part series. Part 1 was introduction and started the 'rules of flight'. Part 2 finished off the rules of flight. This post covers audio, annotations, testing, use of layers and a literature review that covers all three posts.

3. Audio:
Research shows that an audio commentary is much easier to understand than a narrative delivered via on screen text. Labels identifying major sections of the animation also add value. However, adding background music has been shown to be valueless - it's just a distraction in an educational situation.

Audio and visual elements should match in a GET because you shouldn't make users interpret two different presentations at the same time. A critique of a GET which did not follow this advice can be found in an earlier blog post of mine under the heading; "Talk about what's on Screen"

Audio Practicalities: I describe how to produce an audio GET in this tutorial

4. Annotations:
If the GET audio track has a descriptive line like 'and here you can see the extent of the Scottish Highlands' use an on screen marker such as a polygon to draw the viewers eye to the location concerned. Annotations like this should be used throughout tours, its easy to learn about a study area by doing a tour and forget that your users haven't formed a cognitive map. Annotating what you're discussing is a solution to this.

5. Testing:
Despite the best intentions, and having created a GET that you think looks and sounds excellent, often users miss elements that you thought you had made obvious or they misinterpret the message of the tour in ways that the author had not considered. The only solution is to test 2 or 3 typical users before releasing your GET, fortunately, this is much quicker, simpler and cheaper than you would imagine following Hallway testing guidelines.

6. Use of Layers:
A layer refers to a set of data, examples include: a thematic map showing voting by region in an election or a set of placemarks showing locations of pizza restaurants. If you wish to explain a complex map which is made up of a combination of layers e.g. showing that right wing voter States in the USA have more pizza restaurants in them, you will need to use multiple layers. It helps your users if you turn the layers on one by one in your tour explaining what the screen is showing as you go. Showing them all the layers at once and trying to explain what they are seeing is less clear.

Sometimes layers are complex enough to require annotations themselves (e.g. circling an area of particularly dense concentration of pizza restaurants)

Layers Practicalities: In running through a tour to record an audio it can often help to collect separate layers into a folder. When running through the tour you can then select a camera view for the folder and turn all the elements in it on and off at the same time. For example, you could put the pizza restaurants layer and a polygon annotation mentioned above in one folder.

Literature Review: In writing this series I did a literature review which the academics amongst you may find useful. I've expanded it since writing this.

AGI report: State of GI in 5 years time.

2010-05-28T12:17:00.002+01:00

This was a report predicting the future of GI in 2015. It's a good summary made up of opinion from a broad spectrum of GI experts. Of particular interest to me was the section on cartography and visualisation (p 18 main report):

"However, it is not clear if cartographers or visual designers will have more influence in these [challenges of 3D visualisation] developments."

is an intelligent point to make, I see far more visual designers playing with maps on the web than I do cartographers embracing the new GeoWeb tools so it will be interesting to see who influences the development of augmented reality applications the most. However the quote,

"The contrary view is that we may see the death of the conventional 2D map by 2015"

is just plain silly. History is littered with examples of new technologies that were predicted to kill older technologies and didn't. Fax machines were killed by email but theatre, radio and ovens were not killed by cinema, TV and microwaves respectively. There is lots to be said for a 2D generalised map, augmented reality on phones may be dominant by 2015 but don't expect the 2D map to become extinct.

Cartography and Visualization by Mackness is a separate report which the main report summarised. He brings up a good point about the importance of zoom:

"improved capacity to model geographic spaces at multiple levels of detail. Data modelling at multiple scales to support ‘intelligent zoom’ – hugely facilitate map based tasks associated with small devices (with small screen real estate) "

zoom is important and I think it even goes beyond his mobile devices - its very useful on PCs too.

But I was disappointed that whilst he thinks "maps as interface", will be more important to the public in the future he doesn't identify usability of maps as a possible impediment to the development of GI. With each new function developers get to wield in map making there is a slew of bad implementations that are a result of ignoring usability issues, IMHO this is definitely an impediment to effective use of GI tools.

GI and Climate Change: Moving onto the section in the main report I was pleased to see some understanding of the importance of usability being talked about:

"Increasing sophistication in the analysis, presentation and understanding of uncertainty issues, for example how to communicate probabilistic [sic] based information sets. This issue is particularly relevant for scenario forecasting such as climate change or flood risk analysis, where there are increasingly sophisticated datasets availability [sic]"

I agree communication of difficult to understand spatial data to the public will grow in importance. Much the same point is made in the section on renewable energy.

The Data Deluge: Finally, in this section the report talks about the cost of data going down which produces the problem of a data deluge for the public:

"This means that rather than being able to let “the figures talk for themselves” it becomes increasingly important how the information is presented and telling the story associated with the information in a compelling way. This does not mean however to filter the information, to protect it, or to otherwise impede its release – that would be counter productive. Rather the increasing availability of GIS tools and “geoweb” enthusiasts mean that there is a wider pool of people who can be partners in understanding and communicating the issues."

Google Earth Tours are already an answer to 'telling the story' for the amateur enthusiast and I look forward to seeing them and other similar technologies become more popular as ways to dissect public data.

Google Map Styles

2010-05-21T09:31:00.007+01:00

I've been keeping tabs on the Google I/O conference via twitter and the blogosphere. I'm very pleased to see that they've announced that in the latest Google Maps API v3 you can apply styles to Google Maps. Here's an example produced by Programmable Web a developer outside of Google:

This is a move I suspect is driven by Cloudmade, a competitor using OSM (Open Street Map) data. They've introduced the ability to style maps already, here's a nice muted example (Pale Dawn) that would work well if your background map was adding too much visual clutter:

So competition from Cloudmade has driven the development of features that help in the design of maps. Good. But I have a grumble:

No Usability Advice: The post discusses how you can now match the map color scheme with the surrounding web page and make your map 'stand out from the crowd'. Whilst web page styling is important the post doesn't discuss anything about how use color to improve map usability: having a common theme between web page and map isn't much use if it makes your map impossible to use.

Red Fail: The post illustrates the new functionality with an example which misuses color:

amongst several criticisms I could level at it the clear fail is that the sea is the same color as Yosemite National park making it look like California is a peninsular.

To Be Fair: A 'hello world' example illustrating new functionality isn't meant to be polished but the implication I read into the post is that map usability doesn't matter whilst standing out from the crowd does.

Google Earth Tours in Geog. Teaching II

2010-05-20T11:51:00.003+01:00

part I here. This is the second of three posts, this week I finish off the 'rules of virtual flight' section. Next post will cover audio, annotations, testing and use of layers.

c] Avoid complex camera movement: It is possible to fly out from a location while changing camera tilt, bearing and camera lattitude and longitude all at the same time. This can overload the viewers ability to follow where they are and which direction they are looking, the video above illustrates this: the first section shows a complex flight broken down into 3 separate sections where the camera first moves to point vertically downwards, then gains altitude, then changes position. The return flight changes view angle, position and altitude at the same time and confuses the user as to where they have been taken.

Some views are better with a tilted camera angle such as the one of mountain in the clip. If you haven't got a good reason to tilt the camera, a vertically down view is best.

d] North is Top: Country shapes are most recognizable to users with a 'North at top' orientation. If possible your camera angle should keep this bearing in flights.

e] Keep visual cues in view: It is easier for your users to follow where they are in a GET if you keep visual cues in view (e.g. coastlines, mountain ranges etc). If there are not useful visual cues in view, you can create some placemarks that will serve the same purpose, e.g. marking major cities on the tour route.

f] Smoothness: Flights should be smooth and jerkiness is to be avoided, commonly jerkiness is related to the power of the computer (principally the graphics card) and the Fly-to speed selected.

Practicalities: The considerations here concern setting the speed of flight and smoothness of flight. If you are creating placemarks to produce your tour (see tutorial 1 ) you can adjust the speed of virtual flight by Tools > Options > Navigation > Fly-to speed.

If you access Tools > Options > Touring > When recording a tour, you get a slider. Moving this slider to the right increases the smoothness of flight (by increasing the number of 'points' in space GEarth records) but will increase the size of file users will need to open to see your tour. For small tours, the size issue isn't usually an issue. Experiment with different settings to see the effect.

Google Earth Tours in Geog. Teaching I

2010-05-12T10:32:00.008+01:00

This post is the first of three posts on the topic, I offer practical advice on how to use tours in geography teaching with links to specific tutorials where necessary. In today's post I will cover some best practices achievable with with simple tours.

Tours in Education: A tour is a pre-recorded virtual flight around a virtual globe (see example above) and has two strong applications in geography education: A teacher can use them in place of a PowerPoint presentation for part or all of a lesson and students can be set assignments or tasks that involve them producing their own tours.

Why Google Earth Tours? At the time of writing 'tours' are available in two virtual globes, Arc GIS Explorer (AGX) and Google Earth. In some ways AGX offers a richer way to create tours, for example slides from a PowerPoint presentation can be easily incorporated into the tour. However, Google Earth is arguably the better virtual globe and also has a tour audio feature which AGX lacks.

Best Practices: Many best practices in using GETs are the same as best practices for producing maps in Google Earth, for example, good icon design. In the following discussion we refer to best practices that apply mainly to producing GETs. They are arranged in rough order of complexity with the easiest to implement listed first.

1. Scale, Location and GETs A GET is best applied when displaying changes of scale and location. The above example shows an overview of the ships route before zooming in on the ship itself to add detail. If changes of scale and location are not important your narrative it is quicker and just as effective to use presentation software such as PowerPoint.

2. Rules of Thumb for GET Flights These section 2 best practices are part of a group about how to best move the camera viewpoint within a GET.

a] Looped Flight: It is possible to fly from location to location in a way that confuses the user. For example, if we were to position the user over a house in the UK and then fly them rapidly to a house in South Africa at a low altitude the user may fail to realise which country they have ended up in. If the flight path follows a looped path pausing at high altitude with both houses in view, the user has the opportunity to see that they have flown South over the Mediterranean before descending to South Africa.

To force the GET to fly high between two low points of interest simply fly to an appropriate high altitude camera position and insert an intermediate placemark, use of placemarks to control camera locations is explained here.

b] Think about speed: If a flight is too rapid the user might fail to realise where they have travelled to but if it's too slow you may lose their attention. This point is related to point [a] because if you keep visual cues in view the user can follow a quicker flight. This topic needs further research but for now, testing a tour out on a likely user is an effective way of assessing if you have the speed correct.

To be continued.

BBC Election Web Map and Gadget

2010-05-05T13:29:00.006+01:00

UK Votes, Seats through time: I like this web gadget from the BBC, it combines a timeline, a pie chart (votes), a graph (seats in parliament) and video clips in a clever way so you can see how voting in UK elections has gone in the past. No map but I think they were right to leave it off in this case as it would have made the whole thing too complex. It shows nicely how our first past the post system has warped a minority vote into majority governments over the years. If you click the timeline from the left to the present day you can see how the liberal vote (including SDP/liberal alliance which then became liberal democrats) has grown over the years to today.

Change Blindness in Maps: I'm less impressed by BBC this map, its major problem is a lack of understanding about change blindness. Try and spot the changes in the images in this video

Change blindness demo from Breakfast Seminar Series on Vimeo.

you can see that our visual system is incredibly good at spotting small changes* in an image but that it doesn't work if a blank 'flicker' screen is inserted between changes. If you go to the BBC map and select different constituencies the map blanks the screen and flies you out and back in again. Not only is the flight back in unnecessary, the introduction of a blank screen hampers our visual memory to track changes.

*Interestingly, its an evolutionary adaption, spotting a small leaf twitching was the difference between being eaten by a lion trying to ambush you or getting away alive to our ancestors in Africa. Its also the reason you can find a flashing cursor on screen.

Nice BBC Election Map Gadget

2010-04-23T22:42:00.006+01:00

A feature of UK elections is the swingometer, sent up wonderfully by the US daily show (9.10 mins in). Trouble is it only works for two parties, since that's all the competition has been about in most recent elections. For this election, suddenly its a 3 horse race between Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservatives. At short notice, the BBC have come up with a nice little tool, you drag a pie chart around to see how the percentage of the vote translates into seats in parliament. The map is quite clever, they've translated the constituencies into a pentagon representation which gets over the problem of urban constituencies being very small compared with rural ones.

I have a history of dissing the BBC's maps in twitters and on this blog so good to be able to cheer them on for once.

I'm off next week so no blog for at least a week.

Photos in Google Earth via Google Docs

2010-04-21T11:57:00.003+01:00

A while back I posted about how to put photos in Google Earth pop-up balloons using a spreadsheet. Well, with the new Google Docs drawing tool it just got easier. Here's how to do it:

1] If you have an image on your PC, fine. If not, find an image on the web that you want to use (images on the web might have restrictions, creative commons search gets around this). Right click and select 'copy Image URL'.

2] Go to Google Docs . Click the 'Create New' button top left and select drawing. If you haven't got a Google login you'll need to set one up.

3] Click Insert>Image. If you have the image on your PC select 'Choose File' and select the image you want. If you are using a web image, click the chain icon labelled 'URL' and paste in the URL from [1]. If the pasted image does not fill the square, click it and drag the corner boxes so it does.

4] Click the share button top right then 'publish to web'>'start publishing'. If your screen image is large you might want to select the small image size from the 'Image Size' drop down menu. Copy the text from the embed code.

5] Open Google Earth, create a new placemark (the yellow map pin icon top left). Paste the text in the big 'Description' box then drag the 'New Placemark' dialogue out of the way and drag the flashing yellow box to where you want the placemark to be. Select OK.

6] Your placemark should now show your image when clicked.

Additional Things to do:

You can add annotations, text or titles to the image in step [3]. In fact, you don't even need the image, you could have a diagram to show.
Add a title to the placemark in step [5]

Notes:

If there are any alterations to the image in Google Docs it will show up in placemarks even if opened on another computer.
The images won't appear if you are offline, if this is important to you then use the spreadsheet system

Voluntered Geog. Info: Haiti and Teaching

2010-04-14T11:51:00.006+01:00

This video is about how volunteers used satellite imagery to digitise roads, refugee camps and other infrastructure in Haiti following the earthquake.

IMHO its the most important instance of what is becoming known as VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) yet to occur on the web. Those who organised it and those who just took part deserve a great deal of respect, I think we’re going to see a lot more mapping like this in future emergency situations and this was the first example. As they point out, key to this was the rapid publication of high quality satellite imagery.

As it happens, I’ve just completed PolyMap a VGI based educational project for Southampton University where we got the students to create a thematic map via a web service based on Google Maps API* . They mapped tree cover around Mt St Helens volcano in USA to see how trees had recovered since the 1980 eruption, click the image to see a demo:

Thoughts for Others considering setting up VGI: Most of the following was obtained via written student feedback:

I gave students a background presentation of how VGI related to crowd sourcing and other VGI projects (here as a PDF), the students said this helped them realise what they were doing was a valid technique beyond the Mt St Helens problem. Could be useful as a motivator in non-educational situations?
I split the area into a grid and assigned them a square each. This helped in getting the entire area mapped although there was some problems with people working in the wrong square etc.
They complained that the classification scheme was difficult to apply whilst I had thought it was fairly simple and well explained. It goes to show that great care is needed in defining and then explaining classification schemes. My video tutorials on how to produce the map were very popular, fool proof documentation and instructions are well worth the investment of time.
They liked the fact that I collated the data and interpreted it in a presentation after they had finished and working in groups on a shared problem.
Advances in Google MyMaps since we started the project mean it would have been possible and much easier to do this project using Google MyMaps rather than the bespoke PolyMap service.

Other Educational Points:

Student feedback was the most positive feedback I've had for a long time!

The 1980 Mt St Helens eruption is a great topic to teach using technology, satellite images, youtube clips and photographs from USGS are out there in abundance. I think having an interesting context (the eruption) is possibly more important to the learning than the quality of the VGI data.

ArcGIS.com: ESRI's neo-geography tool

2010-04-08T09:31:00.006+01:00

Interesting talk by Jack Dangermond and colleague at Where 2.0 discussing their soon to be released web service: ArcGIS.com.

Background: The reception from the crowd is polite rather than 'stoked' which isn't surprising, this is a collection of neo-geographers (web based maps people) watching a talk from the major player of ~~paleo-geography~~* desktop GIS.

I think its fair to say that ESRI (Jack's company) has failed to capitalize on the virtual globe or slippy maps (e.g. Google Maps ) market over the last 5 years and now they're playing catch up. Jack's statement that the distinction between neo-geography and GIS was disappearing was interesting, pretty much everything they demoed I'd classify as neo-geography rather than GIS - it was all user side features rather than producer side.

Interesting Features: There were a number of interesting features to the web service shown:

Easy to search for maps from providers (Tree maps from Washington city)
Easy to mash-up maps and create a new map (Tree maps and a chosen base map)
Easy to share your map with a group or with the world
Easy to add annotations to public services (here is a pot hole, please mend it Mr Government)
Automatic integration with mobile devices (currently only iPhone)
Presentation mode (earthquakes and aftershocks in Chile)

All the listed features are currently available on Google Maps and Google Earth. Google My Maps does 1 and 3, customisations of Google Maps do 4 and 5 while Google Earth does 2, 5 and 6. The possible strength of ArcGIS.com is that all these features come in one application. However, the devil is in the usability detail, I'll have to wait for the release to see if they have made it usable enough for the public, usability is a key reason why Google Earth/Maps have flourished so far, if ESRI haven't cracked this issue then I think the service isn't going to fly.

*edited 9th Apr: I didn't mean this to be disparaging just as the opposite of neo-geography

UK Election Map: Triumph of Style over Content

2010-04-07T13:19:00.004+01:00

In June last year I reviewed the visualizations the BBC were doing for the European election. Well, the BBC have released their new version:

I'm reviewing it again because they've obviously spent a lot of time and money putting the visualization together but it still comes out as more stylish than useful.

Pros: To be fair to them since last time:

They've taken out the chart junk 3D
They're not differentiating areas using grey any more (at least not in the clip).

Cons:

Why are the floor supports coming up in front of the map? I was left thinking they were marking a specific region for further discussion until I worked out what was going on.
By putting the map on the floor instead of the wall you distort the view, making it difficult to locate your chosen place on the map (as per last time)
A map on the floor can't be pointed at like one on a wall, making it difficult to follow which bit of the map is under discussion. You could get away with this if you annotated the map as it was discussed but they don't.
Beyond this clip the presenter starts discussing other elements than the map. To make the map visually move to the background the map gets a grey mask in front. Unfortunately there seems to be a colored halo around the map and this spreads out from behind the grey mask. Switching the whole map from color to gray and reducing the opacity would be more effective.

GI Usability Conference Talk and Notes

2010-03-29T10:04:00.003+01:00

Google Earth Tours: Testing spatial content

View more presentations from mukih.

Muki has posted my recent talk slides along with the other slides from the day. They're cryptic without my audio explanations so I've produced some notes for you to read as you scan through the slides.

GI Usability Conference and the Last Half Meter

2010-03-25T10:11:00.006Z

Sorry for the absence of posts, I've been too busy over the last week or so but the activities that have kept me away have generated lots of ideas for posts that I'll be getting to shortly.

What is Usability of Geographic Information?: On Tuesday I was at the second GI usability conference (programme and links). The most interesting aspect of the day was comparing my own ideas about what GI usability is against others. To me, its about how data is visualised on screen which is most of what I discuss in this blog. To others it included data structures, metadata, interoperability, topics I think are important but didn't strike me as being 'usablility' before.

The Last Half Meter: Whilst the other definitions of usability I came across are important topics IMHO there is a lack of discussion/knowledge in the area of GI visualisation. To me the situation is nicely summed up by diagrams like this one:

It's a subset of a data flow schema about how a user queries a GI dataset and it's similar to a number of other diagrams I've come across by techies about GISs. in terms of getting the system to work you can clearly see the technical links, what database talks to what etc. but what is missing IMHO is any sort of consideration about how that data is displayed on screen and how the user will interact with it, if you will, the 'last half meter' between the user and the hardware. I want to know more about what will happen in the red box, for example:

How many screens will they need to navigate to post a query?
What happens if their query doesn't produce the answer they really wanted, how will they iterate to a better query?
How will documentation/help/FAQs be offered to them?

All the above are key questions that affect the overall performance of a GIS/user system but they are represented in the figure by a single arrowhead delivering perfect information to the user in a kind of Vulcan mind meld interaction. I think this shows the bias of techies to want to solve the straightforward technical issues like interoperability or speed of display but don't like addressing the messy issue of how the user interacts with the GIS.

In some senses this analysis is a bit unfair, I'm drawing a big conclusion from a single diagram but my argument predicts that you should see GI projects where they author has invested a lot of time in solving technical issues but not tackled some basic rules of cartography/usability. The Hurrican Gustav project that I reviewed is a perfect example and its by no means the only one.

Google Streetview Covers All Roads in UK

2010-03-12T08:59:00.003Z

Via Ed Parsons I learn that the Google streetview car has been busy covering the length and breadth of the UK:

View Larger Map

This is the Ford in Neen Savage, Shropshire, UK. I've spent many happy hours here throwing sticks for dogs to fetch from the river.

Google seem to have done all the rural public roads in the UK including dead ends and this rather fetching view of the flow country in the North of Scotland, I would guess the least populated area of the country

View Larger Map

Its an amazing piece of work, I'm drooling at the educational possibilities, e.g. getting students to hunt for abandoned buildings in Scotland and Hampshire then comparing the results as an exercise in rural deprivation.

Streetview in Google Earth: You can also access the same data in Google Earth and incorporate it in a tour. This KMZ example is a location we take our students to and the tour could serve as a brilliant introduction or debrief for a field visit. A shame the tour doesn't activate the detailed imagery in the Streetview bubble but hey, the students can go back and explore for themselves later.

Streetview Tour HowTo: To produce your own streetview tour in Google Earth:

Turn on the Streetview layer in the Places column. Select the streetview bubble you wish to use.
Right click the Bubble, copy and then past into your Places column.
Record a tour as normal, by double clicking the bubble in the main screen you will be flown to the centre of it.
Save the bubble and tour in a file and you're done.

Well done Google! I'm fascinated to know how many cars it took to do this, it must have been a lot of fun doing too, well, except for the Luddite mobs defending middle England.

Beware Smart Graphics

2010-03-05T18:41:00.002Z

Professional production values make us believe data presented to us in maps, charts and graphics. But consider 'Everyone Ever in the World'. Clever, artistic, beautifully clear and without any sort of basis in fact. Here's Steven Pinker to explain why (worth watching in full but for those of you in a rush, speed to 4.00 mins in) :

What went wrong: If you're interested in why they got it wrong, they didn't take into account 'missing data'. We know how many people died in WWII and it's true we have only a few records of the people who were murdered in 2000-1000 BC but that doesn't mean it was a peaceful time, its just the record keeping was dire compared to today.

Panamap and Haiti VGI

2010-03-03T12:09:00.002Z

A busy week so just a couple of links of interest:

There are still a lot of reasons for paper maps and panamap just thought of another:

I've been watching the Volunteered Geographic Information that has gone on with Haiti. Good to see some promotion for Haiti Maps on the BBC.

Flat Earth II

2010-02-24T18:42:00.003Z

A while back I discussed the advantages of a flat version of Google earth inspired by the movie clip above. You can do it via the Maps API for flash but that requires technical knowledge. A much easier way to do it is to put a world map in Google Earth as an overlay and add placemarks and loops (loops howto). I recently did this for a client, here's a stripped down version

The nice thing about it is that you could put all kinds of world maps in then narrate them with a Google Earth tour. So you could show a thematic map illustrating how much aid per country is being given to Haiti, then fly into Haiti on the Globe to see how the money was being spent.

Trick for the KML savvy: If you produced a tour that flew from a flat view like this out to country, you can edit the tour flyto so that it happens in a fraction of a second, users would then be unaware they'd flown out of a model map to get to Haiti.

Better than Screen Overlay: It makes for a better presentation than a screen overlay because you can add any sort of element above the ground overlay including loops, placemarks (as I've done here) and even other screen overlays.

Flat Map with Tours: One of the good things about this idea is that you can present a flat overview with 3D features like loops or Sketchup Models and in a tour, fly from the flat map out to the globe and zoom in on a particular country. So you could start with a thematic map showing how much individual countries were donating to Haiti then switch back out to the 'real' Google Earth and fly in on Haiti itself to see how the money was being spent.

Tip for the KML Savvy: You could even edit the flyto tag speed to be a fraction of a second, this would take the viewer from the flat map to a high view above the country without them even being aware that they've moved between transitions.

Tuvalu Flooded in Google Earth

2010-02-18T16:11:00.006Z

Tuvalu is a Pacific island famous for being vulnerable to global warming induced sea level rise. I've discovered in Google Earth, its already sunk a long way! A case of the model of the sea floor not being accurate enough in Google Earth. See more in this tour (needs GEarth v5+).

Other Sunken Islands: Previously I spotted the Scilly islands were underwater off the coast of Cornwall.

Global Warming, Snow and Ice tour

2010-02-12T16:09:00.007Z

Lisa Ballagh of NSIDC wrote to point out their new 'Climate Change Tour of Cold Places', its a tour in Google Earth. She asked for feedback so I thought I would review it as a post. She also says she found my series of tour tutorials very useful, glad you liked them Lisa!

Overall Comments:

Good Work!: A lot of work has gone into this, overall I think its successful and informative.
Good Topic: Climate change of cold places is an excellent topic to tackle in a virtual globe because its very spatial (e.g. permafrost is more common closer to the poles). Also, people don't generally look at the poles on a globe so its good to get flown there to consider them.
Convert to YouTube: Given the amount of effort involved, I would definitely convert the tour into a YouTube clip as well. See discussion on this point.
Too Long: I think if NSIDC tracked how users access the tour they would find that its too long and that users were stopping part way through. 3 minutes is my guess as a good length of tour in this sort of instance, a solution is to split off the tour into separate parts as was done in the Colombia bridges tour.
Other Great NSIDC Content: On the same page as the tour page as the tour but lower down, the "Sea Ice: Daily Concentration and Extent" KMZ project is still one of my favourite GEarth projects.

Numbers in the next two sections refer to time in the GEarth tour itself

Pros:

Auto Play YouTube Clips: The use of youtube clips in the tour that automatically play (e.g. 8.47) is inspired. I'll be stealing that code and using that trick myself!
Good Start and End: Use of start screens, end screens, advice to turn audio on and which layers to select is well thought out.
Good Images: Good images have been selected for use in the tour, especially the retreat of glaciers.
YouTube Clips add Human touch: I think the youtube clips themselves add the human touch to the tour, making the content more accessible.

Cons:

(6.33) Fix Photos in Position: At 6.33 an image of Muir glacier slides across the screen showing before and after of glacial retreat. It would be better to fly into the Muir glacier and find the position from where the photo was taken and then overlay the before and after images one by one so they mimic the GEarth view. This gives users a sense of where the glacier is making it more memorable.
(7.12) Flight too Fast: Flights from A to B should be looped to include a high altitude view. This helps viewers work out where they've come from and where they're going. They should also be less fast than this one - most users won't follow where they are going at this speed. However, having said that, other flight segments within the tour were timed correctly.
(4.41) Split Attention: At this time the audio is describing something about glaciers while the placemark label asks the question, "why is Greenland called Greenland?". Users will be distracted by this, it's best not to split their attention, one way around the problem is to make the placemark only appear on screen when the audio track asks the question.
(4.41) Placemark vs Polygon: In discussing Greenland it should be marked as a polygon across the whole country with a camera view showing the whole country rather than the placemark shown at low altitude. A popup will work just as well from a Polygon.
(10.13) Timeline Labels and Annotations: To give viewers a sense of the time of events you could add labels for the times of each image. The timeline labels just aren't big enough to follow clearly. You could add annotations to show the physical scale (Rhode island outline over the ice?) and also add a polygon annotation to show the original extent of the ice shelf. The polygon island annotation should persist throughout the animation as the shelf disintegrates.

To summarise, this is a good tour with some innovations I'll be copying in the future. Although there are some cons I think they're quite minor points and don't distract from the quality of the work overall.

HowTo: Photos in Pop Up Balloons

2010-02-03T11:50:00.005Z

The Need: Recently I've been investigating GIS systems for schools. One of the functionalities that I was struck with in other systems (AEGIS and DigitalWorlds) is ease of linking photos with locations, this isn't easy in Google Earth. If you drag and drop a photo from Windows Explorer into Google Earth (V5+) it creates a Photo Overlay, a kind of virtual posterboard, at the camera view you are currently using. It isn't very usable IMHO because of its 'modes' also, being able to click a placemark and get a pop up balloon is much more useful educationally. Creating a photo in GEarth in a pop up involves writing a bit of html code which is too confusing for most users.

Upload to Panoramio : A solution is to upload photos to panaramio. This is pretty simple and straightforward but

Involves a time delay between upload and being able to view images (my recent uploads still haven't come through after 24 hours)
Requires that photos already on a computer are uploaded to panoramio to be viewed back on the same computer.

So I've created a tutorial using a spreadsheet to help create photos in pop ups:

HowTo:
1] Assemble photos in a single folder somewhere on your PC
2] Create placemarks that will be links to the photos

3] Open Windows Explorer to view the photos. Select the view to be of tiles either by use of the icon or by the View > Tiles menu. Both are shown below marked in solid red:

4] Open the photo creator spreadsheet. Select the address box (dotted circle above) and copy all the text. In the 'Location of Folder' box (cell C2) paste the location of your photos.

5] Now copy the name of the file into the 'Photo name' column. For my photo as it appears in windows explorer above, it would be 'sign'.

6] In the drop down list 'Photo type' choose the type of your photo. '.jpg' is the default, its written 'JPEG' in the screen shot above.

7] Put the original width and height into the relevant columns. From the above screenshot the height is written first and is '1818' and the width second '1228'.

8] Usually a digital photo produces a pop up that is too large so we have to reduce it's size. To do this, put the width of the photo you want in the pop up in 'GEarth Width'. The speadsheet scales the photo to the new size. 300 pixels is a good starting point.

If you want to come back and change the size as it appears in the pop up you alter just this number (leaving the other two columns alone), the spreadsheet will recalculate the text needed, so repeat step [9] but remove the old text in the description box then paste in the new.

9] Once you have entered all the data click on the cell 'Copy This' and copy it. Now go to the relevant placemark in Google Earth, rollover it with your mouse Right Click > Properties and paste the text into the big Description box. Click OK. Now when clicking the placemark again your photo should appear.

10] Repeat steps [5] to [9] for up to 10 other photos. Should you want to come back and change sizes later, all the information for earlier photos is still in the spreadsheet.

11] Create a folder in Google Earth. Click 'Temporary Places' in the Places column then Add > Folder. Drag your photo placemarks into the folder.

12] Now right click the new folder and click 'Save As'. Save the folder with a sensible file name somewhere as a .kmz file (should be automatically selected in the 'save as type' box at the bottom of the dialogue box).

By doing this Google Earth copies the photos from the original location and zips them up into one file, so you can send the file to someone else and the photos open up as they should. You can also remove the original photo folder from your computer and the placemarks will still work.

Troubleshooting: Check that:

The location is exactly as it appears in windows explorer [4]
The name is exactly the same as in windows explorer, check uppercase or lower case. [5]
You did step [6] and that your image is a .jpg, .gif or .png file
That you have entered relevant numbers in all the 3 image size columns [7 and 8]
That you copied all the text from the string
Failing all of the above, discard the spreadsheet and open it blank again from the link above and retry.

When to use Tours in Teaching

2010-01-29T14:04:00.003Z

Google Earth Tours (GET from now on) have excellent potential to be used in education. Here I outline a couple of situations, not requiring a great level of IT skill, in which I think GETs could be very educationally effective:

1. Students Produce a GET: Students find producing GETs interesting and compelling. When used as part of a teaching session as well as being engaging it challenges them to think what camera views best help in communicating their content. For example, after producing a Google Earth map showing litter distribution around school/university buildings students could produce a GET to communicate their findings. This would take the viewer from a high view locating the buildings on a country scale down to and around the buildings concerned with placemarks showing littered areas.

Practicalities: The effectiveness of this activity relies on students not trying to do anything too complex. You may be teaching some bright students capable of producing more complex tours but this will require intensive support from you as educator as they can easily get stuck given the currently available tools. My advice is that you should be strict and allow them only to produce a simple tour as described in this simple GET tutorial.

2. Presentations: A GET is of great value when a planned presentation focuses on a series of maps at different locations. Presenting them in this way rather than a series of slides in a program such as PowerPoint allows the audience to understand location, orientation, scale and relative position. This is because the 'virtual flight' transitions between maps lessens the mental work required to work out where they are. For example, using a GET you could illustrate the location of World War 2 battles across the whole of France. Following this initial camera view you could zoom in to show details of individual battles on the sub km scale. By doing this the virtual flight down from the country scale to the sub km scale adds the locational information for the viewer.

Practicalities: Some map based presentations do not work well in GETs:

Large Scale Maps: very large scale maps where the curvature of the Earth prevents viewing of all the countries at once (e.g. on thematic maps of future global temperature you cannot see the temperature in UK and Australia at the same time).
Single Location/Scale: Maps where only the layer content changes but the camera position of the map remains the same. In this case, viewing in Google Earth does not add any value, its easier to just use a slideware program such as PowerPoint. E.g. weather forecast over the UK at 2 hour intervals over the next 24 hours where the viewing position never changes.

Presentation HowTos: To produce a Presentation using other maps you will need to:

Produce Overlays in Google Earth (probably) (Tutorial)
Produce GETs that define camera positions and turn layers on and off (Tutorial)

When using the tour the controls work like VCR controls, so you will have to remember to pause when you have reached the correct position. This is not as useful as 'click next' controls that can be found in program such as PowerPoint but with a little practice they can be mastered.

GIS in UK Schools: Digital Worlds vs Google Earth

2010-01-20T15:49:00.004Z

Last week I went to BETT which is a big showcase for IT in school Education, so I was interested to see what was on offer for Geography teachers. I found AEGIS (discussed sometime in the future) and DigitalWorlds which I discuss below.

GIS Analysis vs Visualisation: Key to the discussion is a previous post of mine on the use of GIS in schools in the UK. In it I said that curriculums aren't asking specifically for GIS analysis, they're actually asking only for Visualisation. Actually the national curriculum does ask for school teachers to use GIS analysis in classes (see here link via Jason Sawle). I think this is wrong educationally, you can deliver meaningful school level Geography education by getting students to use GIS visualisation without using GIS analysis. It's an important distinction because GIS analysis is complex for school children to undertake whereas its much simpler to do GIS visualisation with Google Earth. I would love to see a teacher try and get the students to complete the activity they describe here in the allotted 20 minutes - more like 1.5 hours I reckon.

ESRI DigitalWorlds: (hereafter DW) I've spoken at length to Jason Sawle of ESRI who is one of a team of two to produce DigitalWorlds, a school GIS. In comparison with Google Earth some facts that aren't in dispute:

Cost: DW is £250 per year, GEarth is free
Lesson Plans: DW comes with a series of lesson plans, 24 in total with 7 more in development. To my knowledge there are 16 Google Earth lesson plans available on the web(1). I can't vouch for the quality of any of these (except my own)
Home: GEarth can be used on home computers, DW licence doesn't allow this.
DW features not in GEarth: comes with historical and modern OS maps of the UK, GIS like thematic/symbols mapping, graphing of points, a wider range of background imagery to choose from and better functionality to produce photos in pop ups.
GEarth features not in DW: 3D visualisation, historical satellite imagery, time slider, Google Earth tours, all the content in layers.

What we disagree about:

Feature Set: Which of [4] or [5] is more important educationally (BTW I may not have caught every difference)
GIS in schools: I think 'simple is best' in this case and that GEarth wins on this count. Jason disagrees with me, he argues that DW has been developed collaboratively with teachers and stakeholders, that school students can handle GIS and that GIS enables 'real world' scenarios to be studied in class as GIS is what is mainly used in industry (I don't deny GIS is industry standard). He admitted that they hadn't done any explicit usability testing of DW which is my main problem with it and GIS generally in schools.

Conclusion: So to be fair to DW, if you think the lesson plans are worth it and you rate [4] over [5] you may want to buy the software. Also, the National Curriculum calls for explicit GIS analysis use which is to DW's benefit in comparison with GEarth. However, your specific exam board may interpret the use of GIS in a more relaxed manner meaning you can just use GIS visualisation and Google Earth (certainly the situation for EdExcel from my reading).

Jason made the point that it isn't necessarily an either/or situation, that you could use GEarth for some things and DW for others. I think he's got a good point from an educational viewpoint but in reality, few schools could afford to do this as the cost issue comes into play.

Related links: Forum posts by teachers about which of GEarth, DW or AEGIS they use and like 1, 2, 3

1] 11 at Juicy Geography, I've done 2 and Google have 4 (secondary Geography - Google also do primary ones which I haven't counted)

Geographic Usability Workshop and absence

2010-01-17T10:55:00.002Z

Sorry no post this week, I have one brewing about GIS teaching in UK schools which will come out soon. Meanwhile, I'm trying to put something together for this UK based workshop about Geographic Information Usability (via Muki Hacklay) which looks like it could be a very useful forum.

London Data Store, Snow Icons and Isle of White

2010-01-08T10:44:00.004Z

London Data Store: A lot of map related news has caught my eye over the last couple of days. Last night the mayor of London promised a data store for London: my neogeographer friends everywhere cheered at the thought of all the new shiny mashups they'll make and went to sleep dreaming of being buried in £10 notes rather than snow.

Snow Volunteered Geographic Information: Talking of snow, there have been a slew of UK snow maps that deserve a look. A trending topic on twitter has been #uksnow, (explanation) where people publish the snowfall conditions in their postcode. There are a number of terms for this kicking around including Volunteered Geograpic Information (VGI) and crowd sourced maps but the best way of describing it as a map wiki: people add their own data to a map and we all benefit from the result.

Ben Marsh has a lovely map website where he takes these tweets and maps them as clickable items. To the right of the main screen (which I've grabbed above) is a list of latest tweets by people and on the left is an explanation and key. Its a lovely implementation, pulling in real time tweets but I think his icons could be improved. You get a choice of an icon made up of white spots showing snow intensity by number of dots (shown outside red box above) or red snowflake icons illustrating snow intensity by size of icon (in red box above). The white icons are difficult to see over the background and you can't really tell the difference between multiple icons showing small snow falls and a few blizzard icons. The red icons stand out well but the smallest of them are not really visible despite being red. A possible solution would be to fade out the google maps background (white translucent layer behind), increase the size of the smallest icon and make the red snowflakes white but with black borders, similar to the beige circles I discuss in another post.

Steven Gray has done a similar experiment using old BBC snow icons (which I was talking about on Tuesday). The one in the screen shot shows snow tweets from the last hour. You can see from the northern most cloud just off the East coast that there are snow icons beneath the black clouds. These get lost against the pale map and could also do with black borders. Steven hasn't sized the icons to illustrate snow intensity which gives the map a different look.

Steven's also produced a thematic map on MapTube where he's colored postcodes by the average snow report over 24 hours. This is my favourite of the three, I think it gets around the problems of icons by combining them into a thematic layer. As with the icon examples though, it would benefit if the background data was paled out to enhance the blue shading.

Finally Ed Parson's had a nice visualization that I thought I'd publish as a KMZ. I've emphasised the SW of England in this view as snow there is really rare.

BBC Weather Maps

2010-01-05T19:18:00.003Z

Southern England where I'm based is about to have a unusually big snowfall. Hellish for anyone trying to travel tomorrow but fine for me as I'm working from home for the next 3 days with a fridge full of holiday left overs :) I drove into London from Southampton today so I was keeping a close look on the BBC weather forcast to check I was going to beat the snow into town. Here's a screen shot:

BBC weather maps are clear and crisp. They also rate highly IMHO for using well chosen colors e.g: blue indicates frost and subtle blobs of white illustrate snow fall (on the forecast film clip only, not in the screen shot above). Where they don't do so well is thinking how these elements work together on the map. In the screen shot above we have a number of competing shades of blue all ilustrating different things:

A] Sea covered with cloud
B] Sea with clear skies
C] Frost
D] Snow
E] Background to a Temperature label (Deg C)
F] Rain

Poor Layer Coloring: They have 6 layers on one map plotted as different shades of blue! The map could be improved by replacing blue shading with the use of symbols, interestingly, this is how they BBC used to do it a few years ago (see above).

Related post:
I've criticised the BBC for overcomplicating maps of elections here.

GEarth Tours: Power first, Usability second

2009-12-22T16:16:00.006Z

The most interesting thing I learnt last week at AGU was about the strategy Google adopted with tours. The Googler who built tours told me they were aiming for power in the first release rather than making them very usable. That explains the current situation where you can easily create a simple tour (my tutorial) , where complex tours which control the timeline and animate objects are possible (see latest Google Tour below)

but where producing such involved tours is very complicated because you have to write KML code directly. I suspect this means that Google are going to work on making tours much more user friendly in the future, as per the positive characteristics I noted about ArcGIS Explorer (AGX).

In my experience people get very excited about the possibilities of technology in teaching and often the benefits aren't realised because teachers are over optimistic about the difficulties and what can be achieved but I predict students will love producing complex presentations based on GEarth tours, it's going to be great.

AGU, Tutorial Use and Harrower on Icons

2009-12-18T14:03:00.004Z

I'm just about to come home from the AGU conference. Its been really worthwhile making the trip, a lot of people I bumped into were complimentary about this blog which is good to hear as blogging is quite a solitary experience a lot of the time. An unexpectedly high number of people have also been complimentary about my tutorials (includes links to older tutorials) and said they use them with their students. That's also really exciting to hear and gives me pause for thought about what else to publish in the future.

I have lots of thoughts, links and ideas the conference which will go into blog posts in the near future, however a gem of a link was given to me by Andrew Turner; Cartography 2.0 is an online text book about developing interactive maps by Mark Harrower. I've just had a quick first read about user interfaces (UIs) and it's well worth devoting 10 minutes to. Most people developing maps won't be building UIs which is a fair bit of the discussion but his comments on icon design and his respect for 'Don't make me think!' by Krug are spot on.

Google Earth Tour User Test

2009-12-15T17:47:00.005Z

This is the PowerPoint of the talk I'm giving at AGU today about user testing of Google Earth tours.

I tried to get it in a more friendly format but the flash version lost the notes.

I'm going to try and video myself doing it as well.

Free Climate Change Data?

2009-12-02T18:02:00.004Z

Ed Parsons has written a post about making Global warming data free for the public. He makes the point:

"Unfortunately people have lost confidence is both politicians and I’m afraid scientists to provide unbiased analysis of data on Climate Change, perhaps we now need to better educate people as to how to look at climate change data themselves"

I'm not sure about 'lost confidence in scientists' but lets leave that for another day. I totally agree that releasing machine readable data is good for society as a whole (with some ethical exceptions) and I also agree with Ed that educating the public about climate change is crucial in the coming years. Ed continues:

"and to make this data available without spin or interpretation so that people can make their own minds up."

He then goes on to discuss EDGAR, a project to make geotagged emission data freely available. He ends:

"And before any climate scientists out there claim that this is ridiculous and that the general public cannot be expected to deal with such complex tools and concepts, ask a surveyor or cartographer if they expected that the general public would be building the only detailed global digital maps a few years ago ?"

The General Public and Complex Tools: I don't think Ed's analogy holds water. It's relatively easy for me to walk out of my front door, turn on a GPS, map some roads and upload that data to OSM to help 'build detailed global digital maps', because a knowledgeable community thought up the initiative and provided the framework by which data could be added (Muki's post expands this idea). In the same way, I can view visualisations of global warming data in Google Earth because scientists have collected data, processed it and worked out the best way to present it. I find it hard to believe 'bedroom scientists' will have the skills to do the same task. You only have to look at the EDGAR website to appreciate the skills and knowledge necessary. I have an MSc in Earth Science and I don't know details such as relative contributions of different global warming gases (e.g. methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide) or whether CO2 from forest fires should be included and if not, how do you take it out of the calculation.

Part of the screen shot Ed used in his post

Climate Change in Google Earth: GEarth is a fantastic tool to inform the public about climate change issues but IMHO its not a lack of raw data that's the main problem, I think its a lack of understanding about GeoWeb usabilty. You need go no further than the screen shot Ed provides to see this in the EDGAR visualisation*:

They've failed to show what the units are in the key
They've used a palette of colours that is difficult to view if you are green/red colour blind
They're showing global data on a Virtual globe - I can't compare the map of Australia with the UK in the same view.

All this gets in the way of what would otherwise be a very compelling story.

Putting my Money where my Mouth is: In a couple of weeks I'm going to present and help chair the Virtual Globes session at AGU , my paper will be on best practices in using Google Earth tours to communicate science (including climate change) to the public. More of that later of course...

*It may be someone in EDGAR has just thrown the data into GEarth as an experiment in which case my criticisms are a little unfair - I have no evidence this is a published project and I don't know what other materials are in the project apart from the screen shot. I *really* want to encourage them to publish on Google Earth and using other GeoWeb tools, I think they have a great story to tell but I'd advise they think about usability before they do.

Osprey Tracking in Google Earth

2009-11-27T10:12:00.007Z

Screen Shot of the Lock Garten Osprey Project looking east over the west European coast

Recently I was talking to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) about their work with Google Earth. They've produced an interesting blog, map and Google Earth file for following the progress of migrating Ospreys that spend summer in Loch Garten. I think its a very good use of Google Earth and maps so deserves some promotion.

Suggested Improvements: There are some easy improvements that they could make. For example, they instruct you to set up a network link. It's easier just to include a network link in a KMZ file as I've done here:

My Enhancements of the RSPB network link

They could also produce a tour, I've produced one in the KMZ file above (and below), its pretty basic but you get the idea of what could be done. They could also think of putting the project in a plugin as below:

Use of plugins has obvious advantages but there are also some drawbacks as I've discussed here.

My final suggestion would be to produce time slider functionality, it would be nice to be able to animate the animal tracks in time as in this whale shark project. If you're not used to operating the timeline see notes*

I was told they get an 'insane number of hits' to the blog already so I think developing the Google Earth part of idea further would be worthwhile.

*To get the whale track to animate, load the file and find the time slider in the top left corner of the GEarth screen. If you roll your mouse over it you will see two sliders, drag the left one to the left so they separate slightly and then drag the right one around to animate the track. The big red cross and little red cross show links to images that are now broken, however, the animation still works enough that you can get the idea of what's possible.