Category: Web Mapping

‘Geospatial Trust Is Hard to Win and Terrifyingly Easy to Lose’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Ed Parsons, who used to work at Google, has some words about the Google Earth AI image generation debacle. “Veterans of the Geo organization understood an unwritten rule that took decades to build: Geospatial trust is hard to win and terrifyingly easy to lose. Google Earth is relied upon by human rights investigators, journalists, emergency responders, and courts of law as a baseline truth layer of our planet. Once you train the public to accept that the satellite view can be whimsically altered by typing a prompt about a ‘lakeside cabin’ or a ‘futuristic metropolis’, you destroy the integrity of the platform. If anything on the screen can be AI-generated, then nothing on the screen can be trusted.”

Previously: Google Earth Goes Nano Bananas (which has been updated a few times since first publication).

Google Earth Goes Nano Bananas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

It’s been possible to use 3D models in Google Earth for decades. But Google’s announcement yesterday its AI image generation model, Nano Banana 2, can be used to create custom images and 3D rendering inside Google Earth is getting some pushback, and not necessarily just because it’s AI.

Henk van Ess is concerned that realistic AI-generated images in the context of Google’s satellite imagery layer will be weaponized in a way that undermines our ability to determine the truth.

Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against. Today it added a button that makes things up. […]

Google’s own description of the “fun feature” is that Nano Banana “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”

Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it. […]

A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. A faction wants a hospital to look flattened, or intact, depending which one is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch.

This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.

Van Ess’s point is that while it has always been possible to falsify satellite imagery, it just got a lot easier. He also discovered that Google’s safeguards against creating images on harmful topics did not prevent him from doing so.

Update: 404 Media: “Google sent 404 Media a statement saying it was ‘rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.’”

Update #2: Google’s blog post has been updated:

We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It’s important to note that generated images didn’t appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated.

Update #3: Engadget coverage.

Update #4, 3 Aug: See also BBC News coverage, in which BBC Verify tested Google’s AI checkers against the AI-generated Google Earth images and discovered that “it was possible to circumnavigate these checks and trick Gemini into saying these fake Google Earth images are real. Tests using external AI detection tools also in some cases failed to identify the Google Earth AI-content.”

AI Crawlers and the Cost of Geospatial Infrastructure

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bill Dollins reacts to Gary Gale’s experience with AI crawlers taking down his mapping project (previously), and what that portends for the open geospatial web. “On its own, this is a small incident. No critical infrastructure failed. No global service collapsed. It is, however, a revealing stress case. It shows how open geospatial infrastructure behaves when exposed to a new class of demand. That demand is continuous, automated, and indifferent to the social and economic assumptions that shaped the system in the first place. This is not an isolated story. It is an early signal of a broader shift already underway.”

Pinhead Map Icons

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot from the Pinhead Map Icons page showing every single icon at a very very small size.
Pinhead Map Icons

Quincy Morgan has released Pinhead Map Icons: “So you’re making a map and need some icons. Well, maybe a lot of icons. Like, for anything that might appear on a map. And they need to be visually consistent. Like the size and direction and whatever. And they gotta be free. Even public domain. In vector format. With no AI. Oh, and they all need to be legible on the head of a pin.” 1,045 icons and counting, in SVG format.

A Street Map of Early Modern Europe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Viabundus is an online map of medieval Europe.

Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka’s Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways.

Viabundus is a work in progress. Currently, it contains a rough digitisation of the land routes from Hansische Handelsstraßen, as well as a thoroughly researched road network for the current-day Netherlands, Denmark, the German states of Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hesse and North Rhine-Westfalia, and parts of Poland (Pomerania, Royal Prussia, Greater Poland). The pre-modern road network of Denmark will be added soon; the inclusion of other regions is currently being planned.

What features would an online map service have, if online map services existed in early modern Europe? Something like this. I tried the route calculator: I found that it would take me approximately 20 days to get from Frankfurt to Antwerp on horseback in 1500. (It’s about four and a half hours by car today, per Google Maps.) People who write historical fiction set Europe in this time period ought to be all over this. [MetaFilter]

14 Million Water Wells in the U.S., Mapped

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The National Ground Water Association has announced the launch of an interactive map showing the location of some 14 million water wells in the United States (yes, Alaska and Hawaii too). “Use this tool to estimate well depths for new installations, analyze water table trends in your area, identify neighboring wells before drilling, research historical well data, and make informed decisions about well placement and design.” [Tara Calishain]

USGS Announces New National Geologic Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot of the Cooperative National Geologic Map (USGS).
USGS (screenshot)

The USGS announced a new, more detailed national geologic map last week.

The new USGS map, called The Cooperative National Geologic Map, was created using more than 100 preexisting geologic maps from various sources and is the first nationwide map to provide users with access to multiple layers of geologic data for one location. This feature allows users to access the multiple data sources included in the map to look at or beneath the surface to understand the ancient history of the nation recorded in rocks. 

Of note: the USGS cites automated processes to speed up the integration of data from its various sources (e.g., state geologic surveys), resulting in a new map after only three years of development.

Exploring the History of Geospatial Software

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Ingrid Burrington is working on a PhD dissertation on the history of geospatial software and she’s posting through it. Two gems I’ve run across so far:

  • (How) do computer maps make money? “The first thing that seems important to state upfront, even though it seems obvious: the business of maps is almost entirely business-to-business, not business-to-consumer. Even if a digital map or geospatial product is consumer-facing, most of the money changing hands doesn’t happen at the level of the individual looking at a map.”
  • Notes on the history of the map tile. “Crediting the brothers Rasmussen and Google Maps with the map tile is sort of like crediting Steve Jobs and Apple for the smart phone: understandable but formally imprecise. Both are examples of a company taking technologies and user experiences that had been speculated on or experimented with and transforming them into the seemingly obvious, inevitable Way Things Are Done.”

When we talk about the history of cartography (and when I deploy the history of cartography tag) we usually think of something older than the goings-on in Silicon Valley a few decades ago: al-Idrisi and Mercator, not Dangermond or Tomlinson. But recent history is still history.

Unauthorized Waffle House Index Disaster Maps Taken Down

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used to assess the severity of a storm in the U.S. South, because Waffle House restaurants don’t close unless Things Are Very Bad. But when Jack LaFond scraped Waffle House’s website to build a map tracking restaurant closures last fall, he got a cease-and-desist from Waffle House over trademark issues. It got resolved more-or-less amiably in the end, but the website stayed down all the same. A different map, Riley Walz’s Waffle House Index map, which I covered last fall, also appears to be offline now, for what I presume are the same reasons.

Google Maps at 20

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Google Maps launched 20 years ago today. Here’s what I posted at the time:

First impressions. This is frigging amazing, with smooth scrolling and zooming: you’re not constantly reloading pages like in MapQuest. Huge mapping surface. And drop shadows. […] I’m impressed by the detail. They’ve got my area, which is kind of a rural backwater: they’ve got the roads all named, but strangely not the towns. Oh well, data’s rarely perfect—especially when it’s just a beta launch. And for a beta this is awfully impressive.

A flurry of additional announcements followed in quick sucession: the launch of Google Earth, the Maps API that enabled people to build their own maps on top of Google’s interface. The mid-2000s were a busy time for online maps, let me tell you. I had so much to keep up with.

The development and origins of Google Maps, and Google Earth, are the subject of the latest and timely installment of James Killick’s “12 Map Happenings that Rocked Our World.” It seems that the Maps side of things was largely about providing Google search results through a map interface, and when you look at Google’s post commemorating the 20th anniversary, which highlights 20 features of Google Maps, it’s clear how expansive that idea has become.

James also makes reference to a book I somehow completely missed when it came out: Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality, an insider history by Google project manager Bill Kilday. (Harper Business, 2018). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

OpenStreetMap Is 20 Years Old

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

OpenStreetMap is celebrating its 20th anniversary today. It was originally created in response to restrictive Ordnance Survey licensing in the U.K., in a context that seems unrecognizable today. Founder Steve Coast writes about the anniversary (mirror link). “Allowing volunteers to edit a map in 2004 was simply anathema and bordering on unthinkable. Map data was supposed to be controlled, authorized and carefully managed by a priesthood of managers.”

Remembering MapQuest

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The tenth installment of James Killick’s “12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World” series focuses on a company James actually worked at: MapQuest, which grew very, very rapidly between its launch in 1996 (James outlines its antecedents) to its IPO and acquisition by AOL a few years later. And then:

The new management seemed to have very little interest in anything to do with MapQuest, particularly as it related to product road map and strategy. And with the layoffs and hiring freeze there weren’t enough resources to do anything substantial even if there was a good plan.

I tried to make matters clear and pleaded with the powers that be: MapQuest was a site built on map data but it didn’t make maps. In fact 98% of the map data was licensed from third parties. I knew MapQuest had to build a moat around the product otherwise someone else could swoop in, license the same data and build a better product.

And you won’t win any prizes for guessing who did.

Previously: Remember MapQuest?