For Google Maps, Diplomacy Trumps Geography

In recent years Google Maps have become a go-to source for web-based mapping. They provide visualizations of virtually any location on Earth to varying degrees of detail, depending on the region. But as Google has gained a foothold in markets around the world, adapting its versions to different countries and languages, an inevitable problem has emerged: how do you delineate international boundaries when they are disputed by multiple countries?

This caused problems for the tech giant earlier this year, when its Chinese characters mislabeled an area called Arunachal Pradesh, which is under Indian administration.

While a simple solution to border disputes would be to stick to internationally recognized demarcations, Google has taken things a step further. Rather than risk antagonizing disputes among its partner countries– each with its own market potential– Google has customized its maps according to different countries’ official positions on their versions of its Maps application.

“This does not in any way endorse or affirm the position taken by any side,” according to a Google spokesperson, “but merely provides complete information on the prevailing geo-political situation to our users of global properties in a dispassionate and accurate manner.”

Take, for example, the Chinese version of Google Maps:
chinamap

The disputed boundaries between India and Pakistan are indicated by dotted lines. But the border with China (to the northeast of India) is nevertheless solid.

Consider, then, the Indian version of the same region:

indiamap

Here, it appears the only disputed area lies between Tajikistan and China, to the north of India. Indian territory itself, including the western part of Kashmir which is often attributed to Pakistan, is not in question. Furthermore, the area between China and India, which in China’s version belong to China, now lies within Indian territory.

Finally, compare these two version to the standard version of Google Maps:

mainmap

Here, all disputed boundaries are indicated by a dotted line.

These border disputes predate the Internet — and are unlikely to go away any time soon.  Google has at least managed a temporary diplomatic resolution in cyberspace.

This blog post originally appeared at Worldfocus.org

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Channtal Fleischfresser, November 3rd 2009 | Tags:
Posted in Google

Wrangling Google Earth into submission: Part II

In our second installment of our Worldfocus Google Earth tips, I’d like to demonstrate another workaround that helped us zoom in on a given region more effectively.

If you’ve ever tried to zoom in from a very high to a very low altitude on Google Earth,  you will have noticed that it takes a while to process the zoom and adjust the resolution.  In addition, on the broadcast we use color overlays on our wide views of countries, which we don’t need when we zoom in close on a city.

You can see the problem in this zoom of the island of Capri, off the coast of Naples, Italy:

A nice way we found to work around this was to create two maps: one of the wider view, and one of the close-up.

Once I export these two map moves, I bring them both into Final Cut Pro and dissolve them together. Take a look at this zoom into the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin:

This post originally appeared at Worldfocus.org.

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Channtal Fleischfresser, September 21st 2009 | Tags:
Posted in Google, Video

Wrangling Google Earth into submission

In addition to editing video and keeping track of the goings-on in Europe and Brazil, lately I’ve developed another pastime: learning how to use Google Earth, the alternately fascinating and infuriating global satellite technology.

Using the detailed mapping software, you can see into your own backyard – literally. You can look out across the Himalayas from the peak of Mt. Everest. But how to navigate Google Earth’s decidedly un-user-friendly customization settings to make them suitable for a television broadcast? That’s a different story.

An example: thanks to increasingly specific satellite imagery, we now have the ability to zoom into cities not only in the U.S. or Europe, but also in many African cities, where for a long time detailed satellite imagery was lacking.

The problem: as you can see in this most recent 2009 composite view of satellite images of Africa, the continent now resembles a 19th-century impressionist painting. Pixelated splotches of color dot the landscape, where some areas have much more satellite coverage than others.

satellite1

Happily, we were able to figure out a solution to this dilemma. Google Earth has an underused “history” button, which allows the user to view satellite images from different dates in the past. (Naturally, the number of dates available depends on what part of the world you are looking at and how far away from Earth you are.)

So if I want to show a view of Africa, but want to see a clean view of the continent, without all the satellite clutter, I can simply select the earliest date possible on the “history” view – in this case 1930.

flat

This won’t actually show you 1930s satellite views if there were none from that time, but in the absence of such satellite imagery, Google Earth will automatically default to a clean satellite view of the landscape. So with this simple work-around, we’ve gotten one step closer to implementing Google Earth on our broadcast. Stay tuned!

Watch this video for some more Google Earth history tips and an interesting visual comparison of how the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has shrunk over the years.

This post originally appeared on Worldfocus.org.

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Channtal Fleischfresser, September 11th 2009 | Tags:
Posted in Google, Video