This week Google refreshed its maps of North Korea. What was previously a blank canvas with only the country’s capital — Pyongyang — visible, now boasts roads, hotels, monuments and even some North Korean internment camps. While this is not the first detailed map of the secretive state it is an important milestone in Google’s quest to map us all.

[div class=attrib]From the Washington Post:[end-div]

Until Tuesday, North Korea appeared on Google Maps as a near-total white space — no roads, no train lines, no parks and no restaurants. The only thing labeled was the capital city, Pyongyang.

This all changed when Google, on Tuesday, rolled out a detailed map of one of the world’s most secretive states. The new map labels everything from Pyongyang’s subway stops to the country’s several city-sized gulags, as well as its monuments, hotels, hospitals and department stores.

According to a Google blog post, the maps were created by a group of volunteer “citizen cartographers,” through an interface known as Google Map Maker. That program — much like Wikipedia — allows users to submit their own data, which is then fact-checked by other users, and sometimes altered many times over. Similar processes were used in other once-unmapped countries like Afghanistan and Burma.

In the case of North Korea, those volunteers worked from outside of the country, beginning from 2009. They used information that was already public, compiling details from existing analog maps, satellite images, or other Web-based materials. Much of the information was already available on the Internet, said Hwang Min-woo, 28, a volunteer mapmaker from Seoul who worked for two years on the project.

North Korea was the last country virtually unmapped by Google, but other — even more detailed — maps of the North existed before this. Most notable is a map created by Curtis Melvin, who runs the North Korea Economy Watch blog and spent years identifying thousands of landmarks in the North: tombs, textile factories, film studios, even rumored spy training locations. Melvin’s map is available as a downloadable Google Earth file.

Google’s map is important, though, because it is so readily accessible.  The map is unlikely to have an immediate influence in the North, where Internet use is restricted to all but a handful of elites. But it could prove beneficial for outsider analysts and scholars, providing an easy-to-access record about North Korea’s provinces, roads, landmarks, as well as hints about its many unseen horrors.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article and check out more maps after the jump.[end-div]