In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Not related to their recent donation (really!), Cube Cities provides an excellent comparison of Google and Apple's 3D building products.

From the entry: "Note how the entire urban fabric is rendered in the computer generated maps, whereas Google's legacy building layer has missing buildings and contains stylistically different models due to it's human-crafted origin. [...] However, Apple currently does not provide a method of loading data into their mapping application, with the exception of the built-in third party data feeds from Tom Tom and Yelp."

Yesterday Google announced that they are discontinuing Google Building Maker as of next June. We mentioned Google Building Maker several times in the past, and while the 3D buildings built using this tool could not be as good as with professional grade data and tools, it was an easy way for anyone to quickly create 3D buildings. This isn't surprising considering that Trimble acquired SketchUp from Google a year ago and that Google launched last June their new 3D models for Google Earth, which doesn't use user-created rectangles anymore ;-)

Also lost to Google users in the same Spring cleaning effort is Google Reader, while this tool isn't geospatial-related, I use it daily to aggregate the geonews for Slashgeo. Hopefully there are alternatives. Google are nice enough to tell us in advance and provide a way to export our data, but it does demonstrate what can happen when you rely on tools you don't control. The same warning applies to proprietary geospatial tools, especially the cloud-based ones (which can 'disappear' anytime), that we rely on to do our work.

Here's the recent Google-related geonews.

From official sources:

• Google made their biggest Street View update ever: "[...] doubling our number of special collections and updating over 250,000 miles of roads around the world. We’re increasing Street View coverage in Macau, Singapore, Sweden, the U.S., Thailand, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway and Canada. And we’re launching special collections in South Africa, Japan, Spain, France, Brazil and Mexico, among others."
• There's expanded coverage of building footprints in Google Maps: "25 million new building footprints that have been added to Google Maps"
• The Dev blog introduces the Google Maps Tracks API and the Google Maps Geolocation API:
  • Google Maps Tracks API allows an organization to build applications that can store, display and analyze GPS data on a map.  The API is built on top of Google’s reliable cloud infrastructure and offers specialized features such as geo-fencing.
  • Google Maps Geolocation API enables an application or device to determine its own location without the use of GPS by looking up the locations of nearby wifi access points and cell towers. By limiting GPS usage, a device can save battery life and work indoors or in remote areas.
• Here's Street View inside Google's data centers

From other sources:

• Here's early screenshots of Google Maps for iOS in alpha testing
• The GEB tells about weather in Google Earth
• And of course, there was the expected satellite imagery update

Modelling our world in 3D gets more and more important within the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. There are several people in the community trying to push forward this development. A major problem is that OSM was not really designed for complex 3D modelling. The node/way/relation + tags based data model does not allow for complicated 3D modelling. Therefore, the community agreed to make use of external repositories containing more complex data which can be linked to OSM.

OpenBuildingModels is such a repository for complex architectural 3D building models. It is free-to-use and aims to improve crowdsourced 3D city models. Anyone can up- or download the models. They can be referenced in OSM and appear on the OSM-3D globe. A first beta version of the web platform is now online and models can be uploaded.

More info:
http://openbuildingmodels.uni-hd.de
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenBuildingModels
http://www.osm-3d.org

Here's the recent Google-related geonews.

From official sources:

• Two entries on Google's updated Google Maps for Android to version 5.7, including several new features:  transit navigation (beta),  updated directions, improved search suggest, photo viewer for Places pages, downloading map areas for offline use, a scale bar and a measuring tool
• Google added ten of thousands of new 3D buildings to Berkeley, California; Cologne, Germany; and The Hague, in the Netherlands
• Google shared a summary of the geospatial content at the Google I/O 2011 conference
• StreetView is now available for Monaco

From other sources:

• The GEB introduces Tribus Organum, an Illustrated history of the world using Google Earth
• The GEB also mentions the 2011 Tour de France in Google Earth