Google Publishes Detailed Map of North Korea | Hacker News Reader

Google Publishes Detailed Map of North Korea

mashable.com

46 pointshoag27 comments

Blog spam. I don't see how Mashable added any value to the original announcement by Google: http://google-latlong.blogspot.ca/2013/01/publishing-more-de...

The sliders were a nice touch, actually...

Mashable adds value to their rewording of Google's blog post in the following ways:

- link company and product names to search engine spam pages

- giant image at the top to monetize 'below the fold'

- tagged with more search engine spam pages

Please don't be ungrateful.

Hard to judge these things by eye, particularly if not a local, but it doesn't look as detailed as OpenStreetMap's (which is also crowd-sourced):

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=39.0174&lon=125.7408&#...

I think that OpenStreetMap is certainly more detailed. Look at the comparison at http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&#...

Especially since OSM's map has been there for ages now.

OSM doesn't have a satellite view. The first thing I noticed by looking at Google's satellite images was just how mountainous North Korea actually is. The country appears to be mostly mountains to me.

You're right that OSM doesn't have satellite imagery (though various partners that use their vector data such as Bing, Mapbox, Mapquest do), but it does have mountains, illustrated a bit more clearly than on a satellite image imho. I'm not sure it's that mountainous compared with some of its neighbours:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=39.03&lon=126.558&...

The data is sourced from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission:

http://srtm.usgs.gov/mission/maptheworld.php

OSM's map is definitely more detailed and has been online for several years now. And while they are both crowd-sourced, Google's version is closed data. It's a real shame. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker

The ariel imagery still isn't as good as Bing, but the new road layouts are much better. However they don't appear to have the river traces which Bing has.

It's interesting because after reading Escape from Camp 14 last year I looked in to visiting the DPRK, considering the moral rammifcations of directly giving cash to the country via one of the approved tourist agencies.

Luckily before I had to decide if it was OK, I found the rules about being a tourist.

No Smartphone. No Radio devices of any kind (no GPS!). No Computers. No digital storage above 4GB. No digital camera with "powerful" lens (they never did clarify).

I went there in April 2012. Computers are OK, and while the border guards check your luggage and take your phone (you'll get it back when leaving) they are incompetent; I brought an iPad and a camera with GPS. The camera even said "GPS" on it, and the guard noticed. But I acted confused and he let me have it back.

You're right about not wanting to support the government there, but the tourism industry is quite insignificant and not a major source of income for the regime. Do consider the moral implications of being used for internal propaganda, though. You'll be photographed wherever you go, and smiling is not really optional.

Don't suppose you've got a blog or anything about your encounters?

Would be interested to hear the account of someone who's a geek enough to hang round here.

I do, it covers half of my visit. It's in Danish, but Google Translate might be your friend :) http://destinationkorea.wordpress.com/

I went with a so-called "Friendship Delegation" to celebrate the birthday of Kim Il-Sung. Quite an unusual experience.

Wow, they've even labelled gulags:

http://goo.gl/maps/6IiCp

And they've actually been mapped by OSM: http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&#...

I was looking for this!

People took the time to "review" the place too. There are two comments there which have useful information, the others are people trying to be funny.

What's interesting though, is that the date stamps go back about two months. Evidently this information has been up for at least that long.

In maps view they are easy to find since they are surrounded by a grey area. Is that the entire area dedicated to the gulags?

Finally! I have been waiting ages for this functionality. Every time I browsed to North Korea it was just a blank gray collection of pixels.

Next step street view!

Has anyone noticed all the blue roofs in satellite maps of North Korea and China? A quick search hinted that all industrial buildings are painted blue, much in the way construction vehicles are yellow.

At first glance, it looks like a mapping detail injected by Google Maps. Anyone have more information on these blue rooftops?

Example (Sinuiju, North Korea): https://maps.google.com/maps?q=North+Korea&hl=en&ll=...

I find it curious that so many roads/streets in Pyongyang have names, it's a relatively new thing that's still hardly universal in Seoul.

I remember the Brownstone residence I stayed at was on a block which had some street names. I found that unusual, especially since nobody knows the names of the streets anyway.

Wait a minute, mapmaker is available in North Korea? Last time I checked, it was not available in Europe. Strange priorities ...

It's available in over 200 countries now: https://support.google.com/mapmaker/answer/155415

Though they're generally the smaller, less developed nations that they don't have existing data for, so although the have "France" listed it actually seems to only let you edit French Guiana.

I assume Google would like to have ownership of the data themselves, but that's not really possible in more developed nations at the moment so they're starting small.

Has NK said anything about this? I thought it was considered a bad idea to do so (retaliation of some sort).

I'm kind of curious about the timing of it all. The satellite views and now these maps didn't pop online until just after Schmidt's visit.

You have to wonder if there were some real non-tourist motives to the meeting that we'll never hear about first-hand.

there are no people/ cars/ anything in most (all?) of the images doesn't anyone else find it strange that its a ghost country?

Why no Street View? I kid, I kid...

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