Google unveils detailed North Korea map... with gulags

SEOUL (AFP) - Weeks after its chairman Eric Schmidt's secretive visit to North Korea, Google has rolled out a detailed map of the isolated state that even labels some of its remote and infamous gulags.

Until now North Korea was pretty much a blank canvas to users of Google's "Map Maker", which creates maps from data that is provided by the public and fact-checked in a similar process to that used by Wikipedia.

"For a long time, one of the largest places with limited map data has been North Korea. But today we are changing that," Mr Jayanth Mysore, a senior product manager at Google Map Maker said in blog posting on Monday.

Mr Mysore said the North Korea section had been completed with the help of a "community of citizen cartographers" working over a period of several years.