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2012 Model Your Town Competition

Over the past several months, hundreds of teams from all over the world have submitted stunning geo-models for our Google Model Your Town Competition. These examples of pure 3D civic pride are breathtaking to behold. Difficult as it was, the SketchUp team managed to pick six finalists, after which we asked the general public to vote for their favorite collection of models. Tens of thousands of you weighed in, and the talented team from the north of Spain were victorious. Zorionak! (That’s “Congratulations!” in Basque.)

The winning team is a dynamic duo: Josetxo Perez Fernandez, 36, is a professional who works in computer administration; and Pedro Domecq Aguirre, 45, is a programmer, 3D data specialist and network administrator. Those are their day jobs, anyway. It turns out that they’re actually world-class, polygon-wrangling, texture-mapping, megabyte-optimizing, geo-modeling superheroes. And now they’re bona fide local heroes, too. Thanks to them, millions of people across the globe can now get familiar with the beautiful little town of Getaria.

The beautiful coastline of Getaria

Not only that, but we’ll also be awarding US$25,000 to a local school and hosting a celebration with the town of Geteria in honor of Pedro’s and Josetxo’s accomplishment.

Getaria Lighthouse on Mount San Antón

Zorionak to the winning town, to the other five finalists, and to all the other entrants who collectively modeled almost 25,000 local landmarks that are now available for all to enjoy in Google Earth’s 3D Buildings layer. The virtual world is a richer place thanks to your efforts, and the real one is a lot better off, too.

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The New Google Earth Imagery – February

Google has just pushed out a fresh batch of new imagery to a variety of places around the world.

Due to the new “Pretty Earth” imagery, it’s more difficult to spot fresh imagery. Also, the imagery this month arrived in Google Maps before Google Earth, which threw us off a bit. In any case, here are some of the locations that GEB readers have identified as having fresh imagery. Many of them were made aware of the new imagery via the Follow Your World notifications, which we certainly encourage you to sign up for.

Here is the list of updated areas we know about so far:

Canada: Villeneuve
Italy: Vernazza
Romania: Deva
Spain: Villacariedo
United Arab Emirates: Dubai
United States: California (Chino, Eureka), Illinois (Decatur), Louisiana (Alexandria), North Dakota (Minot), Tennessee (Johnson City, Kingsport)

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DiscoverBPS

Every year in Boston, parents navigate the school selection process in an effort to get their kids into the best possible public schools. The process is complicated, and, depending on the outcome, can leave parents feeling frustrated and confused. DiscoverBPS was designed to make the process more intuitive, and to help parents make better choices for their kids.

Iteration #1 – Geocoded Addresses

In our first iteration, we used a home address and grade level to identify a student’s eligible schools, and then displayed the results on a map. In the screenshot below, the green circle represents the student’s “walk zone” (in this case, a 1.5 mile radius appropriate to a 7th grade student), the yellow polygon represents the North Assignment Zone, and the markers represent the schools.

With a little help from Google’s Geocoding and Maps APIs, we seemed to be well on our way!

On closer inspection, however, we noticed one school that fell just outside of the walk zone boundary, even though – after zooming in and switching to satellite view – the school campus was clearly overlapping with the walk zone:

Obviously, if our goal was to build a tool to make the process more intuitive, we needed to avoid introducing new ambiguities into the system.

Iteration #2 – School Parcel Shapefiles

To solve the overlap issue, we obtained shapefiles for all of the City’s school properties, and used a PostGIS-enabled database to calculate distances between the home address and the nearest point on the school parcel. In so doing, we were able to calculate walk zone distances, which allowed us to properly identify schools with walk zone eligibility:

After a several weeks of deep-diving into the internals of PostGIS mapping, we seemed to be back on track.

Stepping back, however, a new consideration came to light: was it fair to assume that a 7th grader could walk from downtown Boston, across the Charles River, and to a school in Charlestown in less than 1.5 miles? A Google Directions search suggested otherwise (the route below is estimated at 1.9 miles):

If the purpose of the walk zone policy was to determine which schools a student could reasonably get to on foot (and to discourage parents from busing their kids to schools on the other side of town), our walk zone circle began to seem misleading.

Iteration #3 – Walkshed Mapping

In the end, we decided to use an open source project called pgRouting (which extends PostGIS to provide geospatial routing functionality) along with OpenStreetMap to derive a “walkshed” polygon and to calculate street walking distances. We also could have used the Google Maps Distance Matrix API to calculate walking distance, but opted to go with pgRouting based on the need to create the walkshed polygon. These tools allowed us to then visualize the walkshed in Google Maps:

Aside from being noticeably smaller than the walk zone circle, the walkshed conveys a representation of walkability that is customized to the home address. Notice how the walkshed area is confined by bodies of water that are not spanned by any bridges.

DiscoverBPS is now live at www.discoverbps.org. The walkshed map (which would require policy changes by Boston Public Schools) is being considered for use in 2013.

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Google Earth: Canada’s largest intact forest

In just three minutes, you can take a non-stop, coast-to-coast Google Earth narrated tour of Earth’s “green halo:” the boreal forest. The Pew Environment Group takes you over the vast northern forests and waterways and unveils an ecosystem that stores twice as much carbon per acre as tropical rainforests, holds more freshwater than any other continental-scale ecosystem and teems with wildlife. Watch the tour below or download the KML file to view in Google Earth.

The Pew Environment Group is the conservation arm of The Pew Charitable Trusts, a nongovernmental organization that works globally to protect our oceans, preserve wild lands and promote clean energy. Pew and its sister organization, the Canadian Boreal Initiative, developed this tour to illustrate the nature of the blue forest and its ability to store massive amounts of carbon, primarily in its soil and wetlands. The tour is featured at the launch of Google Earth Outreach in Canada, happening this week.

Viewers will see bears, wolves, and caribou that still roam this vast landscape, learn about aboriginal communities that depend on the boreal, view the Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the most important wetlands in the world, and the last refuges for North American Atlantic salmon.

The Peace-Athabasca Delta viewed in the Pew Environmental Group’s new Google Earth tour.

Unfortunately, Canada’s boreal forest is increasingly affected by large-scale industrial activities. A rapidly expanding footprint of development already includes 180 million acres (728,000 km²) affected by forestry, road building, mining, oil and gas extraction, and hydropower.

Pew and CBI have worked with aboriginal communities, conservation groups, federal, provincial and territorial governments to protect the boreal, resulting in 185 million acres set aside from development to date, including key wetland and river areas. That total represents more than 12% of Canada’s 1.2 billion-acre (nearly 4.9 million km²) boreal forest.

Visit us online to learn more about the steps we can take together to protect this global treasure.

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Updating Your Listing Automatically in Google Places

Days ago Google Places announced on the LatLong Blog that they would automatically update claimed listings more quickly with information from trusted third parties and end users if Google thought the information was more accurate than information that was in the Places Dashboard. They noted:

But now, if a user provides new information about a business they know — or if our system identifies information from another source on the web that may be more recent than the data the business owner provided via Google Places — the organic listing will automatically be updated and the business owner will be sent an email notification about the change.

The policy of changing claimed listings to match what Google claims is more accurate information is not new. They implmented this programlate last year with a 60 day window. Now however the speed with which Google will do the update apparently is.

The previous letters, which also would includ notification of impending status changes like “Permanently closed”, were not sent reliably.

Here is a copy of the letter that is being sent. In this example, it appears that the only information change is to add the last 4 digits of the zip+4 number. In another instance I received, Google was suggesting changing the listing to an 800 instead of the local number that was in the Places dashboard:

Your listing on Google Places will soon be updated

Dear Google Places user,Google will soon update your listing data on our consumer properties such as Google and Google Maps to more accurately reflect the latest information we have about your business.

We use many sources to determine the accuracy of our listing data and to provide the best possible experience for business owners and consumers who use Google and Google Maps to find local information.

Below is a summary of what your listing(s) will contain once it’s updated in the next few weeks. This will be visible on your Place page and listings across Google properties, but it will not be reflected in your Google Places account:

Blumenthals.com

201 North Union St # 307, Olean, New York, 14760-2740, US

+1 7163724008

http://www.blumenthals.com/

If the above information is not accurate, please sign in to Google Places. You may prevent any of these changes from being made on your Place page and listing by selecting “Edit”, and then pressing the “Submit” button to confirm the correct information about your business.

If you submit data to Google via a feed, please ensure that the data in your feed is accurate and current. Note that you must update listing data in your feed to prevent changes from being made to the above listings.

Note that if you are an AdWords or AdWords Express customer, your ads will be unaffected by this change and will continue to display the listing information you have provided in Google Places. To manage your online advertisements, please sign into Google Places or Google AdWords.

For more information about updates to claimed listings, please visit: http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1318197

Sincerely,

The Google Places Team

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Places product or account.

The program’s goal is to improve index quality. If implemented carefully it can work. It is not clear how abuse proof the program is and how much trust Google will put in end user edits. Obviously many of those, if not properly vetted, could create a whole new spate malicious activity.

There is also some irony that a Google forced change to a listing could occur significantly faster than an owner change to the description or category fields.

I for one though will be grateful to stop receicing those stupid emails indicating that a problem I just reported via the report a problem link on my own record might not be updated because:

You should know, however, that XXXX is an owner verified listing and some updates require the approval of the business owner before they can take effect.

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