tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79252391080441780552024-02-06T20:53:07.434-08:00Greetings from Manasquan, NJSean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-24543591975418126312012-10-28T16:41:00.003-07:002012-10-28T16:41:51.371-07:00Offline Maps for Hurricane Sandy, Built By OSM Data in TileMill, Available for Entire Northeast United States<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/files/2012/10/701091main_20121028-SANDY-GOES-FULL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="506" src="http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/files/2012/10/701091main_20121028-SANDY-GOES-FULL.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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As Hurricane Sandy looms off the eastern seaboard, posed to cause a massive incident in the United States, one of the largest concerns is for prolonged power outages, and possible connectivity outages due to downed towers and utility lines.<br />
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No Power + No Internet = No Internet Based Maps..... Unless..<br />
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Thanks to the awesome <a href="http://mapbox.com/tilemill/">TileMill software by MapBox</a>, I was able to generate tiles for the entire North Eastern United States down to level 15, in beautiful and useful detail in about 9 hours. You can see the extent of the cut below.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDq6oEFsHAmsfDDLgr9jJweQl9uHZy8xsv3K5T299O34LnWe3hJ0NskQXS8zeeQWuL0BmXBwQMbhM51uYE81nVW30b7Yn9U0enz3ScYbEV0SOPUcx6mfD7YiDmBmO_DIsf-StoxLNkZe4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-10-26+at+10.45.30+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDq6oEFsHAmsfDDLgr9jJweQl9uHZy8xsv3K5T299O34LnWe3hJ0NskQXS8zeeQWuL0BmXBwQMbhM51uYE81nVW30b7Yn9U0enz3ScYbEV0SOPUcx6mfD7YiDmBmO_DIsf-StoxLNkZe4/s640/Screen+Shot+2012-10-26+at+10.45.30+AM.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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I've tried to scope the cut to the areas most likely to be impacted by the exceptionally large Sandy based on NOAA's projected storm path.</div>
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<a href="http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/storm_graphics/AT18/refresh/AL1812W5_NL+gif/205341W5_NL_sm.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="512" src="http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/storm_graphics/AT18/refresh/AL1812W5_NL+gif/205341W5_NL_sm.gif" width="640" /></a></div>
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MapBox allows tile sets to be exported in the open <a href="https://github.com/mapbox/mbtiles-spec">MBTiles</a> packaging format, which is a SQLITE database that contains the tiles and any metadata. </div>
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Anyone that might be working in the field, or working with first responders in the impact area might want to download this dataset for your use if you lose power and or internet connectivity during the storm and the likely prolonged response and recovery period. </div>
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I can't vouch for the total accuracy of the data or the rendering of that data since it is entirely sourced from OpenStreetMap and MapBox's OSM Bright styling, and take no responsibility for your use of the data.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">You can download the 16GB MBTiles package <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/Hurricane_Sandy/Sandy_OSMBright_North_East_US_15.mbtiles">here</a>.</span></div>
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Here are a few example screenshots of the level of detail provided in this tile set in various locations in the northeast. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie81JHvCItSmdcVes7875Ecl0ZvszOF5kMr04ZQnRHhFYlTQIfMwEjd00VaNNvpp0zKzR6m8c6fCICG0yq-2FolnEmC-a0YgaA4p32jAp6Nrl1YtUea95P26Py7-eJeL94ltmy-Ygz72c/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-10-27+at+10.37.58+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie81JHvCItSmdcVes7875Ecl0ZvszOF5kMr04ZQnRHhFYlTQIfMwEjd00VaNNvpp0zKzR6m8c6fCICG0yq-2FolnEmC-a0YgaA4p32jAp6Nrl1YtUea95P26Py7-eJeL94ltmy-Ygz72c/s640/Screen+Shot+2012-10-27+at+10.37.58+AM.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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New York, NY</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHwrbYrLs5iebTdrJeqXmGLasvEEIVTG1S8oFKimJhrteQYLyK6CXeRNVY0ahnz6PmAXVvUvFcbt9WnZKI-NDMIyztMp4KA1A-vu4R0o7x5dz8bK5156J8jBlv2xvw0_NTYzTc7l3VDZE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-10-27+at+10.39.50+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHwrbYrLs5iebTdrJeqXmGLasvEEIVTG1S8oFKimJhrteQYLyK6CXeRNVY0ahnz6PmAXVvUvFcbt9WnZKI-NDMIyztMp4KA1A-vu4R0o7x5dz8bK5156J8jBlv2xvw0_NTYzTc7l3VDZE/s640/Screen+Shot+2012-10-27+at+10.39.50+AM.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Washington, DC</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbmhfmt32ysQJK17gpEh8BkkFSkZaGbjsT5_zCG-kHDfkJ1ufPFCRJlrcGfE_Zqzuclh-8pEfcBD77xCMLiDgQnzNxrhfmHllr2_2Qbnf2c3N91ZTgHQds7eFBB5_L-Yc0YOteAG3StW8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-10-27+at+10.40.20+AM+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbmhfmt32ysQJK17gpEh8BkkFSkZaGbjsT5_zCG-kHDfkJ1ufPFCRJlrcGfE_Zqzuclh-8pEfcBD77xCMLiDgQnzNxrhfmHllr2_2Qbnf2c3N91ZTgHQds7eFBB5_L-Yc0YOteAG3StW8/s640/Screen+Shot+2012-10-27+at+10.40.20+AM+1.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Boston, MA</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoG9cdQKGu4q9RRjjAbIRGJPlODHDHc1ljHaFkFTP0SXm3Qr_1dJSlxL10rWRKkvu4ADziyz6fEBgHzP8cPyisr1JAqDVz_sYXQYdQ21dUyTkIWnfmiBIw8NLbSMkfJzk0GB-599_Yz_s/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-10-27+at+10.38.25+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoG9cdQKGu4q9RRjjAbIRGJPlODHDHc1ljHaFkFTP0SXm3Qr_1dJSlxL10rWRKkvu4ADziyz6fEBgHzP8cPyisr1JAqDVz_sYXQYdQ21dUyTkIWnfmiBIw8NLbSMkfJzk0GB-599_Yz_s/s640/Screen+Shot+2012-10-27+at+10.38.25+AM.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Manasquan, NJ</div>
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Since the entire package for the northeast is ~16GB - it is too large to put on an iPad or other mobile device, but, the tiles are generated and it is easy to dump the tiles from MBTiles to a flat directory structure, or serve them on a local area network, or on your laptop and then view with a viewer like OpenLayers. </div>
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There might also be utilities to cut smaller MBTiles packages from this one; if anyone knows of something like that, please leave a comment, or if it doesn't exist...build it!. </div>
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A simple way to dump MBTiles packages to flat directory structures (/Zoom/X/Y.png) for use in slippy maps, is <a href="https://github.com/mapbox/mbutil">MapBox's MBUtil</a>.</div>
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MBUtil is a simple python app that reads the MBTiles SQLITE database, and can export to a directory. </div>
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Use is dead simple:</div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Consolas, 'Liberation Mono', Courier, monospace; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19px;">python mb-util Sandy_OSMBright_North_East_US_15.mbtiles /somedirectory</span></div>
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Also, Michal Migurski's <a href="http://tilestache.org/">TileStache</a> will directly serve an MBTiles dataset without needing to inflate the package to tiles on disk, it just takes a little configuration to do so.</div>
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An alternative to this approach for Android users, is to use Offline Google Maps. You can easily save offline maps for Sandy's impact area in the Google Maps application while you still have an internet connection.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/J6sNyKzGOe8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-18648901774892989562010-09-01T07:14:00.000-07:002010-09-01T07:14:28.287-07:00Preparing for Hurricane Earl with Google Earth Enterprise Portable<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgIAVss5BBoaxYzGvOKAb8s_pgX-141w7_0nE0Ki-8AzD001eLZXayWfX1AoYpc4VzJYy6isEna2y_5ZKOg4cDeh-CaWZeXmX7sErz8JgHmxiEogCYpVkCkSe6AKBtLkd3OwlZhfs0U_M/s1600/Picture+11.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgIAVss5BBoaxYzGvOKAb8s_pgX-141w7_0nE0Ki-8AzD001eLZXayWfX1AoYpc4VzJYy6isEna2y_5ZKOg4cDeh-CaWZeXmX7sErz8JgHmxiEogCYpVkCkSe6AKBtLkd3OwlZhfs0U_M/s640/Picture+11.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />
As of <a href="http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCPAT2+shtml/011141.shtml">0800 this morning</a>, there is a chance that Hurricane Earl will glance the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, possibly as a Major Hurricane.<br />
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About a month ago, I created a<a href="http://geosquan.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-hurricane-response-2010.html"> screencast and blog post</a> about the new <a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/portable.html">Google Earth Enterprise Portable</a> system and how we had prepared a Google Earth Enterprise globe of 1-meter NAIP imagery and <a href="http://openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetMap.org</a> vector data for the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States in preparation of an active 2010 hurricane season.<br />
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The portable cutting works very well and it took just over 16 minutes to create a complete copy of the Google Earth globe that a first responder would want to take into the field with them should Earl make landfall and knock out communications infrastructure.<br />
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To review, this is how simple it is to create a Google Earth Enterprise Portable globe for field deployment.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">1. Prepare to Cut</span><br />
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The Google Earth Enterprise software includes a web-based cutter application which asks you to name the globe you'd like to create, specify a spatial extent, and provide a brief description.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcqW_MtuViQbSpSZCdwxa2IDH0oXJE5Yq-3DF0rZ3uxKfhEn_zy7FSONrq9teEQrlJ26T9u1eQebhE-FqJK_aqUxXQwAMz5xcAOthormbRPpoxxQbEEqrJZ4UFdRr4-ftdJ4WHrJaLKM/s1600/Picture+14.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="348" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcqW_MtuViQbSpSZCdwxa2IDH0oXJE5Yq-3DF0rZ3uxKfhEn_zy7FSONrq9teEQrlJ26T9u1eQebhE-FqJK_aqUxXQwAMz5xcAOthormbRPpoxxQbEEqrJZ4UFdRr4-ftdJ4WHrJaLKM/s640/Picture+14.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />
In this case, I'm using the NOAA National Hurricane Center's 72 Hour Cone of Uncertainty as my spatial extent. This means that the cutter will cut from the globe at relatively low resolution outside the cone, and at full resolution inside the cone.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">2. Cut</span><br />
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The next step is to hit the "Build" button and wait while the portable globe is generated.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7hrfY3Ub6PHvRB2Tg_njXe3kws9KRdKFD7vlmGz0sBC-XdIwK3SZQ5bmcj9ZVWmeKs2tUCIw4BjqwvwwJdkn_B5i8WKz3NcrxzvCVOso_jIsHCz2ZTxkiQOculwT8gnKmPcwaz7BwNkA/s1600/Picture+13.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7hrfY3Ub6PHvRB2Tg_njXe3kws9KRdKFD7vlmGz0sBC-XdIwK3SZQ5bmcj9ZVWmeKs2tUCIw4BjqwvwwJdkn_B5i8WKz3NcrxzvCVOso_jIsHCz2ZTxkiQOculwT8gnKmPcwaz7BwNkA/s640/Picture+13.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The cutting operation created a 4.61 gigabyte globe in just over 16 minutes. As the graphic illustrates, almost all of the Outer Banks in North Carolina and parts of the sound intersected the cone of uncertainty, so this globe will have the complete raster and vector data for these areas in full resolution. </div><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">3. Download and Serve</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Once the globe is created, it is available to the entire organization or access group of the administrator's choosing and the single .glb file can be downloaded to run on Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop computers or laptops.<br />
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The globe can be either used locally by 1 user, or broadcast over a local area network for 10 users to share - all without any connectivity to the internet or external networks.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikfso-9HlR3WiNmaGL1rHUwpeIztJJlWnvZbWUlOBzJAVSdXbv-eEcrn-Kw28qS_tbSuQyK8IInxHcJ5cPwM01G1P3aAMGZYdrIRpc6YLjIeOcZFCUycqrs2nWBy0rp0dtAtFIBwr0nyI/s1600/Picture+15.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikfso-9HlR3WiNmaGL1rHUwpeIztJJlWnvZbWUlOBzJAVSdXbv-eEcrn-Kw28qS_tbSuQyK8IInxHcJ5cPwM01G1P3aAMGZYdrIRpc6YLjIeOcZFCUycqrs2nWBy0rp0dtAtFIBwr0nyI/s640/Picture+15.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />
The .glb file can be instantly dropped into the Google Earth Portable "Globes" folder and the browser-based interface will allow you to select this or any other .glb file you have on your system. You can connect to the globe either with the Google Earth API browser plugin (by clicking "view in browser") or you can view the globe in the full Google Earth Enterprise Client by connecting to the localhost server.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvBf23GTnCoynsuOe9we3vxO6j2yEdknSPN5UyV7yXEdKwE746hXQGbrCLewNzUyWjVCUMvE9Dhrk2Yvdo2zt_lcmelmSn3d6sb5AwdvPvcY5lgBxTUXeJHd5QI5MWY0omyg8OF8F_upk/s1600/Picture+16.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="324" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvBf23GTnCoynsuOe9we3vxO6j2yEdknSPN5UyV7yXEdKwE746hXQGbrCLewNzUyWjVCUMvE9Dhrk2Yvdo2zt_lcmelmSn3d6sb5AwdvPvcY5lgBxTUXeJHd5QI5MWY0omyg8OF8F_upk/s640/Picture+16.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Shown in the browser plugin, you can see how areas to the north and west of the area of interest are blurry and lack vector data, but areas where Hurricane Earl might make landfall are in full resolution. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMGJ8U5T6hM6vfgQ-C1d3OvfK3ezxiJDXxFTsZQBOXGzQAC12AyvgVeA9Y6wnpSIx604utapf6v-S43hvDQU5TyPnkb5XvuWq24nSsVxRSlN1KxIWyT22X62_xKvqswOH4LLzdJO9EKaA/s1600/Picture+17.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMGJ8U5T6hM6vfgQ-C1d3OvfK3ezxiJDXxFTsZQBOXGzQAC12AyvgVeA9Y6wnpSIx604utapf6v-S43hvDQU5TyPnkb5XvuWq24nSsVxRSlN1KxIWyT22X62_xKvqswOH4LLzdJO9EKaA/s640/Picture+17.png" width="640" /></a><br />
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Zooming in, you can see the detail of the cut imagery and vector data which would be available to anyone in the field.<br />
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For a more detailed discussion about this process, feel free to review the previously posted screencast about Google Earth Enterprise Portable and Hurricane Preparedness here:<br />
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If you have any questions, please contact us at <a href="mailto:google-hurricane-2010@googlegroups.com">google-hurricane-2010@googlegroups.com</a> .Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-85231145844710855272010-07-28T18:35:00.000-07:002010-07-28T18:35:16.104-07:00Google Hurricane Response 2010<object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/R3H0AjTGZ_U&hl=en_US&fs=1?rel=0&hd=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/R3H0AjTGZ_U&hl=en_US&fs=1?rel=0&hd=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/R3H0AjTGZ_U&hl=en_US&fs=1?rel=0&hd=1">Click Here to Play in Full Screen 720p HD</a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';">It has been another remarkable year for those of us in the geospatial community. Looking back, we've learned a lot as we strive to make an impact for the good of all with our technology, particularly in times of crisis. Sadly there have been many crises this year from which to learn, be they war, drought, fire, earthquake, political revolution, oil spill, etc.</span><br />
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</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';">I don't know, maybe the world has always been this turbulent. Maybe now we just notice it more because we are all hyper-connected and can freely pass information around the world at an unprecedented rate. That is of course, when all the lines of communication are up and operating optimally. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';">We've learned however that far too often, in times of crisis, those lines of communication fall apart. Sometimes, we forget that there are parts of this world that are still years, if not decades, away from broadband internet. Still, we expect our soldiers, our humanitarians, our first responders and our volunteers to head off into these situations to get whatever job needs to get done done.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';">At Google, we've worked with these awe-inspiring individuals as our customers, our friends, and even our own family members and we've learned a lot about what doesn't work for them in that last tactical mile or when some natural disaster has wiped out infrastructure.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';">When we heard the reports about the <a href="http://www.mahalo.com/2010-hurricane-season-forecast">National Hurricane Center's dire prediction for the 2010 Hurricane Season</a> we made a conscious decision to be proactive and be prepared rather than waiting and reacting if and when one of these storms threatens to make landfall this summer. </span><br />
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To that end we built a Google Earth Enterprise 4.0 globe, which is detailed in the video above, precisely designed to generate Google Earth Enterprise Portable globes in the event of a major hurricane. The globe is built from 103 counties worth of United States Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency National Aerial Imagery Program acquired from the <a href="http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/">USDA Geospatial Gateway</a> county imagery mosaics and extracted vector data from the <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Open Street Map</a> project. Portable globes can be cut from this globe extremely quickly and be distributed days or even hours before landfall if the storm makes an unanticipated deviation in course.<br />
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If a major Hurricane threatens the US this year, we are ready to help. Please watch the video above to learn more about this effort and please feel free to contact the Google Hurricane team at <a href="mailto:google-hurricane-2010@googlegroups.com">google-hurricane-2010@googlegroups.com</a> should you have any questions or would like more information.</span></div>Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-83884927468986787212010-05-07T11:57:00.000-07:002010-05-07T11:57:36.221-07:00Assembling Virginia's Geospatial Data with Google Earth EnterpriseOver the course of the past few weeks I've spent some time scouring the internet and university websites in the Commonwealth of Virginia to try to collect as much publicly available geospatial data as I could. To my delight, there is a lot more data online now than back in the 2000-2005 timeframe while I was a student at Virginia Tech's Geography department, working with Virginia GIS data quite regularly.<br />
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However, it could be a lot simpler. Not only did I have to spend a great deal of time searching for the data, often it was warehoused in sites that were not friendly to bulk downloading the entire state at once. Some scripting helped here, but it was still somewhat cumbersome.<br />
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I also found lots of dead links, even on sites like Virginia.gov. This includes the occasional missing file, or worse, sometimes entire data-sets have disappeared. <br />
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Also I have to say that my overall experience working the nearly 500GB of data that I did find was disappointing. Data in the Commonwealth of Virginia is primarily found in one of five projections.<br />
<ul><li>UTM Zone 17</li>
<li>UTM Zone 18</li>
<li>Virginia State Plane North</li>
<li>Virginia State Plane South</li>
<li>A custom Department of Transportation Lambert Conical Statewide projection</li>
<li>or, Unprojected WGS84</li>
</ul><div>Now, knowing this helped a great deal because SOOOOO MUCH of the data comes without accompanying projection files, or any metadata that describes what projection any given piece of data may be in. Frustratingly, much of the data was also commingled so that you might literally have all 5 projections for a single data-set seemingly randomly distributed throughout a single data-set. This likely occurred because the data was never really assembled all together in a seamless GIS before, and instead the tiles were used one or two off at a time in desktop GIS software. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I wanted to be able to visualize all this data in one environment though, so I've done a lot of work to fix the problems, and where possible, track down the source data from the original providers. I'm very happy to find a good steward of this data for the Commonwealth now that I've corrected it so that others can find clean data to use in their project. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I have only just scraped the tip of the iceberg of the total GIS data for the Commonwealth - there is so much more out there hidden in all of municipalities web-based GIS systems that would be fantastic to incorporate. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I also hope that one day the work I've done on the Google Earth Enterprise system will be made available to the citizens of the Commonwealth. After all, it is your tax dollars that are paying for all this data - you should demand a way to use it easily! </div><div><br />
</div><div>If you're interested in seeing the Google Earth Enterprise for the Commonwealth of Virginia's progress thus far, and for more discussion about existing GIS data-sources in the Commonwealth, please view the video below. </div><div><br />
If you have any questions please leave a comment, or e-mail my colleague at Google, <a href="mailto:maryjean@google.com">Mary Jean Clark</a>.</div><div><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><object height="349" width="620"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11493426&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11493426&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="620" height="349"></embed></object></div><a href="http://vimeo.com/11493426">Virginia Google Earth Enterprise</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user3747625">Sean Wohltman</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</div>Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-68611430311374900902010-03-05T12:35:00.000-08:002010-03-05T12:35:17.432-08:00Geotag Photos with an Android Phone and Any Digital Camera<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3tdO7K0K-I3rEEymfynXnhvCaATo1V0IQC3sfcG9oT9yFf3AJmXOiotApdwsnPy6qIJLk_sYbCXaX1iux1MCW3exTVJ7XDhH_TIwWt8ZdQBKM03_hAMICwIzVxMxN5ksoMmsKJU-sSW8/s1600-h/Picture+10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3tdO7K0K-I3rEEymfynXnhvCaATo1V0IQC3sfcG9oT9yFf3AJmXOiotApdwsnPy6qIJLk_sYbCXaX1iux1MCW3exTVJ7XDhH_TIwWt8ZdQBKM03_hAMICwIzVxMxN5ksoMmsKJU-sSW8/s640/Picture+10.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There are many ways to add geospatial information to photos, whether you use Flickr or Picasa's Heads-Up Digitizing Tools, or an expensive camera with a built-in GPS, a camera phone that has a built in GPS, or a GPS Data Logger and a standard Digital Camera. However, I wanted to share a way I use an Android Smartphone (Motorola Droid) and a standard point-and-shoot Digital Camera (Canon SD780 IS) together in a hybrid approach to automatic geotagging. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This approach lets me cut down on the devices I need to carry along with me (don't need to carry a GPS data logger anymore), and lets me shoot higher resolution images than the 5MP camera on the Droid would allow. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The Tools You'll Need:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Android Apps:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">My Tracks for Android:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://mytracks.appspot.com/images/mytracks_website_header.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="57" src="http://mytracks.appspot.com/images/mytracks_website_header.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
<a href="http://mytracks.appspot.com/images/qr_big.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://mytracks.appspot.com/images/qr_big.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">GPS Test for Android:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=135x135&chl=market://search?q=pname:com.chartcross.gpstest" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=135x135&chl=market://search?q=pname:com.chartcross.gpstest" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Linux / Mac / PC App:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/">gpicsync</a>: Follow the instructions for installing on your OS.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 1. Start Logging:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Launch My Tracks and from the context menu choose "Record Track," this will start the My Tracks data logger. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You'll need to keep your phone out (screen can turn off) for the duration of your picture taking - My Tracks will record your track.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 2. Launch GPS Test:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As with using a stand-alone GPS, you need to take a temporal reference photo to figure out the time difference between the GPS system (in which your log file will be recorded) and the camera time (which will be timestamped in each image). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">To take this image, use the free app GPS Test to display the current GPS time in the UTC time zone. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 3. Set Your Camera's Time:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">My camera has a home / away function so I can set my home time zone but also an "away" time zone - in this case my "away" time zone will be UTC time. Your camera may vary, but try to set the time as closely as possible to the UTC time shown in the time screen of GPS Test.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKBOu6v0Qld0gQF2tYDrO7ktZjSCPnLs7Y3GA4VQKgVeYDRjt3IWgQLq-Rhj4gYcJK3lcduHGfdqH5tG8HGfDsrg-iCePc7EI_jHCM3Iavx6AjdYHty7kVq3y0OKTUbdR7P_OA2-RRqjg/s1600-h/2010-03-05+09.32.06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="490" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKBOu6v0Qld0gQF2tYDrO7ktZjSCPnLs7Y3GA4VQKgVeYDRjt3IWgQLq-Rhj4gYcJK3lcduHGfdqH5tG8HGfDsrg-iCePc7EI_jHCM3Iavx6AjdYHty7kVq3y0OKTUbdR7P_OA2-RRqjg/s640/2010-03-05+09.32.06.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGvs7qgLOWGUu42oa7dRAS8BowFcRz1FQZs2AYwpW3dWcuYtlUPVxFovETmgBVBPlnzOocRzRj4yLuJLBY8UEfsOZD71iU_cx19ekFcQ5PKqREykq5CW3HtwB2Cfbj7EGRuAfzw3D5en8/s1600-h/2010-03-05+09.34.35.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGvs7qgLOWGUu42oa7dRAS8BowFcRz1FQZs2AYwpW3dWcuYtlUPVxFovETmgBVBPlnzOocRzRj4yLuJLBY8UEfsOZD71iU_cx19ekFcQ5PKqREykq5CW3HtwB2Cfbj7EGRuAfzw3D5en8/s640/2010-03-05+09.34.35.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 4. Take a Picture of Your Phone:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">From the Time screen in GPS Test, take a photo of your phone's screen with your camera - this picture will serve as your temporal reference in gpicsync so you can investigate the time difference between the GPS and your camera when you go to sync the photos to the GPS track.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Bs0rzQJFdvrU3azD-Smu-RyLRBQ6_dsPwHLfm6qIuxcUJnE7wDRGlwaYASCTZiImgcnxTw7ke8rPWJfCObikCeMx0ULjX6Jo02Me6Z4tBklwiJpJqlXsKf4C1XNDMH04WCYuy8LPO-s/s1600-h/IMG_1177.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Bs0rzQJFdvrU3azD-Smu-RyLRBQ6_dsPwHLfm6qIuxcUJnE7wDRGlwaYASCTZiImgcnxTw7ke8rPWJfCObikCeMx0ULjX6Jo02Me6Z4tBklwiJpJqlXsKf4C1XNDMH04WCYuy8LPO-s/s640/IMG_1177.JPG" width="392" /></a></div><br />
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</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 5. Keep You Phone Out, Take Pictures:</span><br />
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Your phone can probably stay in your pocket, but it needs a view of the GPS constellation to record your track well.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 6. When Finished Shooting, Stop Recording Your Track:</span><br />
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Use the context menu in My Tracks to select "Stop Recording".<br />
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You should have a nice map that shows you the track you collected.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHHVa-Xb418RWsGuet5SWT0ke2eVkzeFtgzQN932IFlGh6t6gU1Z3lMeTEHOFdAakbJefXHjfjHwHMJ7vm8GecTwWjPp9TRn_KRxhs-icdMl582k46IuavsJhSrALOwjI5_COWSOpN854/s1600-h/IMG_1175.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHHVa-Xb418RWsGuet5SWT0ke2eVkzeFtgzQN932IFlGh6t6gU1Z3lMeTEHOFdAakbJefXHjfjHwHMJ7vm8GecTwWjPp9TRn_KRxhs-icdMl582k46IuavsJhSrALOwjI5_COWSOpN854/s640/IMG_1175.JPG" width="368" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 7. Send Yourself Your Track:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Use the "Share With Friends" feature of My Tracks to e-mail yourself a "GPX" version of your track, you will use this file as your track in gpicsync.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-T4K06icNfUWjeQN2v5pIJMnin5Ap20Jvj9tsxD1OkaG64sXlOQiiYh85L60s58peFixHoX5YbmIn7MjMbUpfu5t0rkJchdyvSQ4VP_nxPQAB9UdzU9bF3jTTnjVo6VosfpA4OGMDYAc/s1600-h/IMG_1176.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-T4K06icNfUWjeQN2v5pIJMnin5Ap20Jvj9tsxD1OkaG64sXlOQiiYh85L60s58peFixHoX5YbmIn7MjMbUpfu5t0rkJchdyvSQ4VP_nxPQAB9UdzU9bF3jTTnjVo6VosfpA4OGMDYAc/s640/IMG_1176.JPG" width="346" /></a></div><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 8. Launch gpicsync, Fix Time: </span><br />
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The first thing you need to do is to set up the time correction, from the Options menu choose "Local Time Correction"<br />
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Open the temporal reference image in a program like Google's Picasa, or just Windows Explorer or Mac OSX's Finder to simultaneously see the timestamp (camera date) of the image and the time that is shown by GPS Test for the UTC time.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJvLcc9gH0rIgvQJ7nZz3UZN3VCGiBuO2kzs3z7iCdSL2aAL9zU7GL-WBZiwBpjinMfdIXNCcUO5Xx9VwED2_3lkLtmMLckjHPkFN4Vm0xG0Bw7Mm0RYWJpU20j4in4m9lXWgDXo9fJBQ/s1600-h/Picture+7.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJvLcc9gH0rIgvQJ7nZz3UZN3VCGiBuO2kzs3z7iCdSL2aAL9zU7GL-WBZiwBpjinMfdIXNCcUO5Xx9VwED2_3lkLtmMLckjHPkFN4Vm0xG0Bw7Mm0RYWJpU20j4in4m9lXWgDXo9fJBQ/s640/Picture+7.png" width="604" /></a></div><br />
Enter these values into the Local Time Correction Dialog.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIWeyAhEWi5nGDXhbpRo4SIDEi8aEqvv1VMu_AbgRuuH3cOkg8nj-dSOvVvSgm2K1tPKBKgsLTc0-Q_YYktnASHofMuPljswZm87a-Pd4QJ_ZrY0QoWM5lKoS6mctEsypHaJpUrt8ocuY/s1600-h/Picture+8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="378" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIWeyAhEWi5nGDXhbpRo4SIDEi8aEqvv1VMu_AbgRuuH3cOkg8nj-dSOvVvSgm2K1tPKBKgsLTc0-Q_YYktnASHofMuPljswZm87a-Pd4QJ_ZrY0QoWM5lKoS6mctEsypHaJpUrt8ocuY/s640/Picture+8.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Step 9. Select Your GPX Track and Photo Directory</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">For the "Pictures Folder," select the directory on your computer where you have downloaded the photos you want to be automatically geotagged in the gpicsync application. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">For the "GPS File," select the GPX file that you previously e-mailed yourself. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Click "Synchronize" and gpicsync will index the times in the GPX file and then for each image in the directory check the timestamp of that image against the index to see where you were when that photo was taken and automatically will update the image's EXIF Header to include a GPS position. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyzltIDBWgBAp7TaDgcEbKJ8FrpJ8ao9QdwT5qsw9DlIgldWPUidJDr5rpbupXzRtdjhIkngNnplR7s2Fo7X6wRTlVr6VUdMtd46foGO11W1hGJCKYMwwZSlavQn-i93rRErXHFO3HT00/s1600-h/Picture+11.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="396" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyzltIDBWgBAp7TaDgcEbKJ8FrpJ8ao9QdwT5qsw9DlIgldWPUidJDr5rpbupXzRtdjhIkngNnplR7s2Fo7X6wRTlVr6VUdMtd46foGO11W1hGJCKYMwwZSlavQn-i93rRErXHFO3HT00/s640/Picture+11.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />
When finished, you will have a directory of automatically geotagged photos, a backup of the original photos, and even a KML file that you can open and view your photos spatially in Google Earth.<br />
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Or, you can just upload the photos to a site like Flickr or Picasa and the website will automatically read the EXIF Headers and will store your photos as geotagged photos online.<br />
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Check out an example of a recent Helicopter tour I took with my parents and the geotagged photos I took using this method <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/albumMap?uname=wohltman&aid=5444810861303314497#map">here</a>.Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-65727696303621625782010-01-19T10:48:00.000-08:002010-01-19T10:48:18.668-08:00Utilize NGA Geoprocessing Tasks For Haiti in Your ApplicationsI was very impressed last week with the speed in which the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's eGEOINT Management Office made some <a href="http://egeoint.nrlssc.navy.mil/haiti/">useful web-based GIS tools</a> available for first responders to the Haitian Earthquake.<br />
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The "<a href="http://egeoint.nrlssc.navy.mil/haiti/">DemoBase Haiti</a>" site unfortunately still only works in Internet Explorer, which I've communicated to the agency is DEFINITELY NOT the browser of choice for pretty much anyone I know that is responding to the earthquake with their geospatial skills.<br />
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Go to a CrisisCamp or OSM Mapping Party and count the default IE users on one hand....they probably just got a laptop with Windows and haven't had a chance to install Firefox or Chrome or to wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu :)<br />
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However, IE remains the security-threat cesspool of choice for the US Government computers so I guess most development STILL gears itself with IE as a baseline.<br />
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Well, I thought it would be useful to expose the really powerful pieces of the DemoBase tool, the Geoprocessing Tasks, to anyone that wants to call on the NGA / NRL servers in their web-based applications.<br />
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The DemoBase tool currently has one very nice GP task, a Zonal Statistics tool that allows you to draw a polygon anywhere in Haiti and get back a Population estimate.....as accurately as the ESRI Zonal Statistics tool and the NGA data is anyway.....like I said, it is an estimate.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4375A3QsQL5gX5g49xzbkNVjLRjMDNh5Ls-TECWVFHmxCCLOTb1uiYYXAnvib06rYaQCFDolT7AWdryoIh28zi-8UHycV3A22DdjOaz5bkXsE57RbpSJce0jtuhmTTWgGAt6Wk9z_70I/s1600-h/Picture+4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4375A3QsQL5gX5g49xzbkNVjLRjMDNh5Ls-TECWVFHmxCCLOTb1uiYYXAnvib06rYaQCFDolT7AWdryoIh28zi-8UHycV3A22DdjOaz5bkXsE57RbpSJce0jtuhmTTWgGAt6Wk9z_70I/s640/Picture+4.png" /></a><br />
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But, it could be incredibly helpful for those on the ground to be able to view recent imagery in an application and then just digitize a polygon on a city block of rubble and be able to estimate the population of that block.<br />
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I'm not a full time ESRI JavaScript API developer, but I did get some help from David Spriggs at ESRI to boil down a process for sending a simple polygon to the ArcGIS Server and receive a population estimate in return - I hope it is helpful for anyone trying to add some analytic capability to their Haitian support efforts.<br />
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I also hope that a more widespread use of the geoprocessing tasks will show the agency how powerful exposing these services can be and they'll continue to offer more geoprocessing tasks to their current offering - lord knows they have the data to make some very useful and interesting applications....<br />
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In my example, I simply create a polygon (a rectangle) out of an array of coordinate pairs - but you should be able to adapt the functions to any GeoJSON or other polygons you might have in your application.<br />
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My code will simply initialize and send the polygon through to the Geoprocessing Task and then display the result.<br />
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<a href="http://code.google.com/p/opengeoprocessing/wiki/NGAHaiti">Here is the code</a>Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-78998962481162924332010-01-15T09:43:00.000-08:002010-01-15T09:43:14.871-08:00Haitian Earthquake Emphasizes Danger of a Split Geo CommunityMy career has afforded me the opportunity to be part of what I believe to be a wonderful and generous community; the world geospatial community. A typically happy group of geo-nerds armed with laptops, gps enabled gadgets, and a strong foundation of thinking spatially.<br />
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Now, this community certainly has some big business motives behind it, but whenever there is a disaster, or crisis like we are seeing now in Haiti, this community comes together and throws everything it has to offer to help. It energizes me to do what I can to help in these times of need and dedicate myself to applying my trade to the cause. And as a Google employee, I'm blessed to have the full support of my management to work full time when necessary on these events.<br />
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While the first few hours of this particular disaster were frustrating as I watched the machine slowly gear up, I am blown away at the response we've pulled together - we're actually learning from these events and each one seems to get a little easier to manage - even if the scale of the disasters always seems to increase.<br />
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I sat on an early conference call with representatives of all the major GIS vendors, first responders, geo-nerds, NGOs, govies, and the media where everyone brought what they could do to the table and people teamed up to go do what they do best together.<br />
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For example, I watched Google, DigitalGlobe, and GeoEye all work together to get <a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/01/haiti-imagery-layer-now-available.html">stunning imagery collected, processed, and published FREE to the international community</a> to help a wide array of aid workers and first responders within 24 hours.<br />
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I watched the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the US State Department, and other government agencies get critical and informative data and <a href="http://egeoint.nrlssc.navy.mil/haiti/">applications</a> out the door and into the hands of people that needed them within mere hours of the disaster - a far improvement from the Katrina days!<br />
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Perhaps most impressive has been the response <a href="http://www.opengeodata.org/2010/01/14/haiti-openstreetmap-response/">that Mikel blogged about </a>to the utter lack of vector data that the Geo Community had access to just after the earthquake.<br />
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Stealing his images, just look at the difference in <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetMap</a> Port-au-Prince in just a few days of the Geo Community swarming and finding old CIA library maps, public domain maps, etc and the new imagery released by the commercial satellite providers.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b>OSM just after the Earthquake</b><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2729/4274264771_6873e16fa0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2729/4274264771_6873e16fa0.jpg" /></a><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>OSM Today</b><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;">Now, that transformation is wonderful - it is astounding - but it isn't complete because there is a Split in the Geo Community that isn't being well addressed.<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">OpenStreetMap is not the only community data collection platform - Google also has <a href="http://www.google.com/mapmaker">MapMaker</a> which has similar tools and goals, and has done a very great job of expanding Google Maps to areas of the world where data was not traditionally available. If I lived in an area that previously had blank Google Maps coverage, I was given the tools to fix that problem and many users around the world have been happy to work on maps of their own area so they can enjoy Google Maps, Directions, etc.<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I thought it was great that in addition to the countries from which Google already allows non-profits to download MapMaker data, that Google added the data from Haiti and is now allowing any non-profit to download and use Google's data to help during this crisis.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;">But OSM and MapMaker aren't talking and I think it is a big problem - if you want to help rescue efforts in Haiti where do you go to digitize? OSM? MapMaker?<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">How can 2 projects be expected to be in synch? Which is more "correct"? Which is more current? <br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">This split means that these questions have to be asked by first responders, and by those working to create products for them.<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Is that road up there passable?" "Does it really exist?"<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">It means that the Geo Community is responsible for an extra decision between a first responder and a VICTIM.<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">As it stands right now, even though the MapMaker data is free for non-profit use, projects like OSM can't use the data because there are commercial uses for OSM and the data belongs to Google, not OSM.<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">These are the old fights of GIS data; these are Navteq and TeleAtlas bugaboos IMHO, not what I expect to see today!<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">The differences are pretty glaring between OSM and MapMaker in some cases - take a look at the data I downloaded from both over Port-au-Prince.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidEX3gsCTM9-X1j-_TJU-aJqSGCB1UyRGnrTYO9qu1Gn5UKFpZ-ZVbm9B-Hikt61sQc_Aa-SRtXEA7W6D155v7QMYYiB7EBuU_eaJkBd41y3KPPWoGEP_yHTDrtmJ75Or-mwfjJt7oHkg/s1600-h/MapMaker.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidEX3gsCTM9-X1j-_TJU-aJqSGCB1UyRGnrTYO9qu1Gn5UKFpZ-ZVbm9B-Hikt61sQc_Aa-SRtXEA7W6D155v7QMYYiB7EBuU_eaJkBd41y3KPPWoGEP_yHTDrtmJ75Or-mwfjJt7oHkg/s640/MapMaker.png" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFfbV510Gah1xl1UZaCzsKkhaLMwGXnPp1jqWu2AkSDPlSV92aLQ1N5mV93Wx06iW_NKXRTSEQ3yX5BGF1DmzNGjVEeLOC_ukL_BziC2J5Qnyy1Cjhf14Vml5HjEHTV49EimGu1DSzYLM/s1600-h/OSM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFfbV510Gah1xl1UZaCzsKkhaLMwGXnPp1jqWu2AkSDPlSV92aLQ1N5mV93Wx06iW_NKXRTSEQ3yX5BGF1DmzNGjVEeLOC_ukL_BziC2J5Qnyy1Cjhf14Vml5HjEHTV49EimGu1DSzYLM/s640/OSM.png" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9YdPwHsRZYKpTP1x8t1YbhAVzr3C7bEwRRilbx0UJbtXolrciKAL0Y5bTiTZE3dIX_FlpT7hq5H4YfE345KyI5kiZG4Wl2atjcxyFPSYm4oe7BfGIMmiO3wI1Yh71KtFvsBj-YBWkOws/s1600-h/Both.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9YdPwHsRZYKpTP1x8t1YbhAVzr3C7bEwRRilbx0UJbtXolrciKAL0Y5bTiTZE3dIX_FlpT7hq5H4YfE345KyI5kiZG4Wl2atjcxyFPSYm4oe7BfGIMmiO3wI1Yh71KtFvsBj-YBWkOws/s640/Both.png" /></a><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The data is similar, but different, and needs to be conflated. Where that conflation happens, how it happens, I don't know - but I do know that we need to do something to fix this split before it gets people hurt.<br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">That said, it is good to have 2 or more different projects; it forces competition in the tools, each project has different goals and metrics of success, and it probably ultimately means more community contribution as different groups migrate to different platforms - all adding to the cumulative Geo Community base data.<br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">However, the data ultimately has to be conflated somewhere - and I urge OSM and MapMaker to work more closely with each other and build some sort of cross platform utility that lets users share edits and co-create data.<br />
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</div>Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-14908098046859256502009-08-09T19:10:00.000-07:002009-08-09T20:16:02.309-07:00Preparing for Afghanistan Elections and Humanitarian Efforts<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qPoSJ46fiMA&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qPoSJ46fiMA&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />Some fellow Google engineers and I participated in the Summer 2009 Nangarhar PEAK activity at Camp Roberts near Paso Robles, CA. We got to work with some of the great crisis management and neogeographer minds for a few days as we prepared government provided data for <a href="http://twitter.com/ToddHuffman">Todd Huffman</a>, whom works for an NGO to take to the field.<br /><br />Todd will be observing the upcoming Afghanistan elections and will be using the technology we glued together this week to help him do so, as well as continuing his many nation-building NGO efforts.<br /><br />The bulk of the data was provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, but it was provided in a raw format, with no geospatial viewer.<br /><br />The Google Earth Enterprise team knew we could help out, and we processed the imagery for Todd through<a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/earth_enterprise.html"> Google Earth Fusion</a>, and then published the data as a map, and 3D globe to a <a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/deployment_options.html">Google Earth Enterprise Server</a> running in an Ubuntu Virtual Machine connected to a mac-mini which was provided to Todd to run GeoCommons by <a href="http://www.fortiusone.com/">FortiusOne</a>.<br /><br />Within a few hours of the first day, we had our imagery tiles being consumed by many web-based Geospatial applications that Todd would also be able to take to the field with him.<br /><br />Most of the applications were already configured to work with Google Maps on the Internet, so they knew how to utilize our tiles. In many cases, only a few lines of code and new URLs had to be added to their software packages to work with our Enterprise version of Maps which can be used on or offline.<br /><br />First - Mikel Maron of the <a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetMap Foundation</a>, Josh Livini of <a href="http://umbrellaconsulting.com/">Umbrella Consulting</a>, and Michal Migursky of <a href="http://stamen.com/">Stamen Design</a> <a href="http://walking-papers.org/">Walking-Papers.org</a> and got our imagery tiles feeding in as the basemap for the Walking Papers slippy map.<br /><br />Michal built Walking Papers for users in mixed tech environments to print out hard copy maps from OpenStreetMap and bring them out in the field to take notes and collect data. Users can then bring their paper maps into Walking Papers by submitting a scan of them, and their notes and annotations are automatically re-georefferenced to the map thanks to some QR code magic.<br /><br />This alone is a substantial advancement - keeping the loop of geospatial production working without ever loosing georeferencing and causing users to have to do extra work.<br /><br />Todd has already mapped out a lot of Jalalabad, but is going to be helping the locals to do a lot of the mapping in their homeland themselves to build out the data on OpenStreetMap.org. Walking Papers will allow him to orchestrate this without having to have a lot of computers or other tech gear to worry about - just print a map and give it to a local expert to annotate or send them out in the field to mark points of interest and street names. Since many hardcopy maps are going to be printed, the team realized there was an opportunity to use them for multiple purposes.<br /><br />Josh injected some Python scripting in the Walking Papers workflow which creates an arbitrary grid on the image, and has the ability to apply transparent tiles from the Google Earth Server or from OpenStreetMap thanks to Mikel Maron's work over the base imagery. The grid is intended to allow someone in the field, with no GPS, to use a simple, cheap cell phone and report incidents via SMS by utilizing one of the other technologies that integrated with the Google Maps -<a href="http://instedd.org/geochat"> InSTEDD's GeoChat </a> .<br /><br />The grid Josh designed was optimized to make it easy on the end user to report back position over SMS with minimal character usage - and it is scale agnostic. The grid pairs to the map ID on the Walking Papers map, and then GeoChat translates the coordinates on the fly and can display them as an overlay on a map and be read by users in multiple formats; Lat Lon / MGRS / USNG , etc.<br /><br />Walking Papers was ported to run offline by Josh and Michal and now resides in a local capacity on the same virtual machine and hard drive that is running the Google Earth Enterprise Portable server.<br /><br />The guys from <a href="http://www.sahana.lk/">Sahana</a> and <a href="http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/aug/07/integrating-50-centimeter-data-national-geospatial-intelligence-agency">Development Seed</a> were able to bring our tiles into their Content and Disaster Management systems as well, and Andrew Turner was able to log in to his donated server remotely and reconfigure GeoCommons to use the tiles as well. Now all of these platforms have the code in place to pull tiles from Google Earth Enterprise servers in the future when the next disaster strikes.<br /><br />All paired together, a mobile deployer or crisis responder can take a very light weight but powerful suite of geospatial utilities in the field for stand-alone use, or connect to a network and serve their data out with other local and remote users - with or without Internet connectivity.<br /><br />I was truly impressed with this group - we knew what our objective was and knew where our different technologies could come together and provide the needed solution. For me, it was wonderful to see a compelling use of our technology and watch it work pretty much flawlessly with open geospatial technologies as we've been promoting. Not bad for a few hours of hard work and a group vision.<br /><br />*UPDATE:<br /><br />Mikel Maron's Summary of the Work @ Brain Off<br /><br />http://brainoff.com/weblog/2009/08/10/1410<br /><br />http://brainoff.com/weblog/2009/08/10/1435<br /><br />Development Seed Blog:<br /><br />http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/aug/07/integrating-50-centimeter-data-national-geospatial-intelligence-agency<br /><br />http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/aug/05/data-collection-simulations-field-camp-roberts<br /><br />Eric Gunderson's Photos:<br /><br />http://www.flickr.com/photos/developmentseed/sets/72157621841118753/Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-47371951768904181332009-03-03T13:27:00.000-08:002009-03-03T13:55:37.849-08:00Open Geoprocessing: Let's Share Some Code<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5c6a2opVfjhxWXnrlTx6mZ1NzFbzGLQfrj9fFCYy605S20Mx3vmeZ02Gir0RE1Pmij5vtFJKD2c9C_TBtFfzwvuxqbOtVsvgTn7abAR7vvDAI-nJXngQ4WLCdKdYVJvM9jE3tKOfffJs/s1600-h/Picture+10.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 435px; height: 203px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5c6a2opVfjhxWXnrlTx6mZ1NzFbzGLQfrj9fFCYy605S20Mx3vmeZ02Gir0RE1Pmij5vtFJKD2c9C_TBtFfzwvuxqbOtVsvgTn7abAR7vvDAI-nJXngQ4WLCdKdYVJvM9jE3tKOfffJs/s400/Picture+10.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309080115524865938" border="0" /></a> About 2 weeks ago, I released a <a href="http://geosquan.blogspot.com/2009/02/esri-geoprocessing-in-google-earth.html">screencast </a>discussing the use of the Google Earth API and the ESRI JavaScript API to bring Geoprocessing capability to the free Google Earth platform.<br /><br />Since that time, I've been demonstrating the demo at the Google Earth Enterprise Users Conference, the ESRI Federal Users Conference, and the NOAA GeoTools conference, and lot of folks have asked for the source code.<br /><br />I always wanted to make this code open and available for all to implement and improve on, so I've released it to a new Google Code Site: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/opengeoprocessing/">Open Geoprocessing</a>.<br /><br />I'm looking for anyone interested in flushing out some of the functions to make it more robust, but also looking to move on from utilizing the ESRI JS API for the geoprocessing to doing the same type of geoprocessing using some completely free Open Source Geo tools.<br /><br /><br />Here's how I see this working, let me know if I'm totally off in the wrong direction:<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXQTqNIiUn7vpyPI8JGO5VlwIKL_W_9KYbUCS1Y_7PRPfjFsPzUnXQaoi0ciMurfg1WH95Sodz_RYukPfJNvLrYjqTYkeTIGjOVeFCVQdLhGSthdBSsjqZTOrLwRUT9ZX_ljSIkXF2ZFk/s1600-h/Picture+11.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 620px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXQTqNIiUn7vpyPI8JGO5VlwIKL_W_9KYbUCS1Y_7PRPfjFsPzUnXQaoi0ciMurfg1WH95Sodz_RYukPfJNvLrYjqTYkeTIGjOVeFCVQdLhGSthdBSsjqZTOrLwRUT9ZX_ljSIkXF2ZFk/s400/Picture+11.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309082907513739810" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJRIq8tTUkMDBvj9MO2y4GXjoTE-nnzZXGZScHPr4oSVIAs6rDEr2JBAUPGC7Xu2F5LoByKPj3n9y1fzt7AqGP9cLmRUDoacWfM6bD52Tr88HBWH4z4IF96VTIQKMCf9LEQMYriK1fBBk/s1600-h/Picture+12.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 620px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJRIq8tTUkMDBvj9MO2y4GXjoTE-nnzZXGZScHPr4oSVIAs6rDEr2JBAUPGC7Xu2F5LoByKPj3n9y1fzt7AqGP9cLmRUDoacWfM6bD52Tr88HBWH4z4IF96VTIQKMCf9LEQMYriK1fBBk/s400/Picture+12.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309082911068383090" border="0" /></a>Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-56861552343350623452009-02-17T21:14:00.000-08:002009-02-17T22:35:03.351-08:00ESRI Geoprocessing in Google EarthI've heard it for years: "Google Earth is great, no really, I love it, but....it's not analysis."<br /><br />OK - I guess what you've been saying is that while hundreds of millions of people have downloaded Google Earth all around the world, and have used it to <a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/08/tracking-hurricane-gustav-in-google.html">prepare for and respond to natural disasters</a>, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=6759110">find drug farms</a> ,<a href="http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0610-google.html"> protect the rainfores</a><a href="http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0610-google.html">t </a>, <a href="http://earth.google.com/outreach/cs_darfur.html">bring attention to and spatially explain the Crisis in Darfur</a>, even do <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=6759110">Imagery Intelligence Analysis </a>- that all of this is "just qualitative analysis."<br /><br />Tough crowd.....<br /><br />So despite all of those things, I still hear that Google Earth isn't analysis, and this almost always comes from staunch GIS shops.<br /><br />Hey, I understand - I'm a GIS guy too. I guess what you're getting at is that unlike the GIS systems you've always used, Google Earth is more of a Geospatial <span style="font-style: italic;">Exploration</span> System, and you want to be able to do some qualitative analysis - some geospatial analytics.<br /><br />Ah, maybe some Geoprocessing?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQqpTLCHRsp0QzBBS_bfClzDMPs41VAnAJok7y_165tctQHTsljvnZgm3SiXQ-e2N0fCbg7RPoztjC_9ulFUnLiMZwnuis053muWwvXj63uXDHAD5ooI2l_ZjO97x2q5GNrXD9u6mAlj8/s1600-h/wikipedia-logo.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 217px; height: 266px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQqpTLCHRsp0QzBBS_bfClzDMPs41VAnAJok7y_165tctQHTsljvnZgm3SiXQ-e2N0fCbg7RPoztjC_9ulFUnLiMZwnuis053muWwvXj63uXDHAD5ooI2l_ZjO97x2q5GNrXD9u6mAlj8/s400/wikipedia-logo.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304006804854494674" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p><b>Geoprocessing</b> is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS" title="GIS" class="mw-redirect">GIS</a> operation used to manipulate GIS data. A typical geoprocessing operation takes an input <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataset" title="Dataset" class="mw-redirect">dataset</a>, performs an operation on that dataset, and returns the result of the operation as an output dataset. Common geoprocessing operations include geographic feature overlay, feature selection and analysis, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology" title="Topology">topology</a> processing, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics" title="Raster graphics">raster</a> processing, and data conversion. Geoprocessing allows for definition, management, and analysis of information used to form decisions.<sup id="cite_ref-0" class="reference"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoprocessing#cite_note-0" title=""><span>[</span>1<span>]</span></a></sup></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>OK, so what if we could extend that Google Earth user experience to be able to leverage your current or future geoprocessing capabilities? </p><p>I first saw the potential for this, before coming to Google, when Jack Dangermond and John Hanke <a href="http://where.blip.tv/file/903438">co-presented at Where 2.0</a> last May.</p><p>They showed a great little demo of the Google Earth client communicating with the ESRI ArcGIS Server, but you could tell the communication was a little bit of a kludge.<br /></p><p>They were using the embedded browser and the center of the Google Earth ?BBOX= NetworkLink information to pull the demo off.<br /></p><p>That was before the <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/earth/">Google Earth API</a> (3D Google Earth browser plugin) was released.</p><p>Now however, we can actually build this application utilizing simple JavaScript and capturing key user events, then passing these events as real geometries over to the <a href="http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisserver/apis/javascript/arcgis/help/jsapi_start.htm">ESRI ArcGIS Server JavaScript API</a> and do it all right in the web browser!<br /></p><div style="text-align: center;">Watch a short screencast of the application below:<br /><br /><object height="400" width="620"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MzMZIJiq1FA&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/MzMZIJiq1FA&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="400" width="620"></embed></object><br /><br /><br /><br /><img style="width: 620px; height: 370px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwSnDhV-paDVg9yuJq1Gywa7swfqxuWIZLSqg9zHxG61Mbr1-IrNt3znK7F5KtVHqWL_5ogeSbGqGf9VF24IAmc4VvhC7IS4RuHh6KHE_u-TVQMyWb7EMmiJO2Nzi1WrqOXQik6HT1W9g/s1024/Picture%2011.png" /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">I first started working on this back at GEOINT in November where I quickly hacked together a side-by-side example of the Google Earth API and the ESRI JSAPI , and then demoed some more refined progress last week at the Google Earth Enterprise User's Conference in D.C.<br /><br />Durring that demo however, I was still unable to conduct the second required geoprocessing task on any drive-time-rings that were complex or that covered a large area - which was most of them.<br /><br />It turns out, that there is a pretty significant limitation on geometries that you send Geoprocessing task queries on the ArcGIS Server if you're not running your application on the same server as the ESRI software.<br /><br />It bombs out if the geometry in the query exceeds 2,000 characters (which is a browser limitation) and the only way around this currently is to complicate the ESRI JSAPI by deploying a proxy in ASP.Net or Java / JSP...<br /><br />This is a shame, it really makes things more difficult than I'd like them to be for interacting with ArcGIS Server services - I don't think I should have to mess with Tomcat configurations to get things working...but alas, we do for now.<br /><br />Ok, now off to the ESRI Federal User's Conference - I'll be demoing this application at the Google booth, so stop by and say hello and check it out and tell me how much you hate it in person :)<br /><br />I promise to have some well commented source code and a link to try out the application up on Google Code ASAP!<br /><br />Next up - Geoprocessing with some Open Geospatial tools on the backend.....stay tuned.<br /></div><br /><br /></div>Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-51971437976610698992009-02-06T07:13:00.000-08:002009-02-06T07:30:04.000-08:00Is it Just Me, or does ESRI's ArcGIS Server Mashup Challenge Feel Like a Rigged Scam?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.esri.com/events/devsummit/challenges/mashup.html"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 199px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfCesudsLBL-rBXlEenJ77hJ0kUy0yDyp-BK_OvbxigVnlHN08aq3Sle0GJzYXeb4q58EdG-Aws_1QuXb-GuFgPdKuCT123-tpTQo4yGDTrBnNfo_4BZG5tT80GXVq6dloLSXADBKuT40/s400/Picture+25.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5299703379409624178" border="0" /></a><br />For some reason or another, I was toying with the idea of going to the ESRI Developer Summit this year.<br /><br />Unfortunately, after looking at the agenda it looked less like what I would consider a developer summit and more like an indoctrination into more ESRI tools.<br /><br />Wish they had a track that was for those that wish to leave ESRI on the edge of their geospatial world; leveraging the ArcGIS Server API's where they are useful, and writing the majority of their code against more open platforms.<br /><br />Speaking of that, I've been having a lot of fun working with some of ESRI's demo ArcGIS Server API's, and have a pretty sweet mashup I hope to have launched by the time of the ESRI Federal User conference in mid February.<br /><br />As I was stumbling around the Developer Conference today, I came across an advertisement for the Mashup Challenge (linked in the picture above).<br /><br />1st Place: $7,000<br />2nd Place: $3,000<br /><br />Nice, I could set up a sweet OSGeo Rig with $7k.....<br /><br />But, looks like I'm not eligible:<br /><br /><blockquote>3. Eligibility: This Contest is open to all developers who are the legal age of majority in<br />their country of residency, including Sponsor’s business partners, so long as<br />applicant/applicant's organization is a licensed user of ArcGIS Server 9.2, ArcGIS<br />Server 9.3 or a current ESRI Developer Network (EDN) subscriber prior to the<br />Contest Period, except for those developers who are residents of Burma, Cuba,<br />Iran, Libya, Malaysia, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Province of Quebec, and where<br />prohibited by national, state, provincial, or any other governmental laws or<br />regulations.</blockquote><br />My org isn't a licensed user of ArcGIS server, and we're not in the EDN...bummer.<br /><br />What would I need to spend to be in the running to win that $7k???<br /><br />Also, looks like ESRI will own the code that I or anyone else would submit, and use it for whatever purposes they sit fit....like a demo to sell more ESRI licenses....<br /><br /><blockquote>BY SUBMITTING THE CODE SAMPLE, THE APPLICANT REPRESENTS AND<br />WARRANTS THAT HE/SHE HAS ALL RIGHT, TITLE AND INTEREST NECESSARY TO<br />GRANT THE SPONSOR THE WORLDWIDE, IRREVOCABLE AND UNRESTRICTED<br />RIGHT AND LICENSE TO ADAPT, PUBLISH, USE, EDIT, AND/OR MODIFY SUCH<br />CODE SAMPLE IN ANY WAY AND POST THE ORIGINAL CODE SAMPLE ON THE<br />INTERNET OR USE THE ORIGINAL CODE SAMPLE IN ANY OTHER WAY AND<br />AGREES TO INDEMNIFY AND HOLD SPONSOR HARMLESS FROM ANY CLAIMS TO<br />THE CONTRARY. </blockquote><br /><br />No thanks. - that's a lot to ask for for the <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">CHANCE</span> to win $7k.<br /><blockquote></blockquote>Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-49919053856834869012009-02-05T09:48:00.000-08:002009-02-05T10:45:32.754-08:00Will Latitude Succeed Where Spatial Social Networking Trailblazers Failed?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 399px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwPgBh2aWrdBQVw4d5uagC0o0bSzU481SvaPos2qiIJUgRHTRHYE5G_XuSCbxh5dsziJUWlv7yHw6qjpBxd-W39rQ3fC5UF75G4SkMkHlOhEQs8tNlQcKvzroXFyvUxot-NmcBTHXlPWQ/s400/Picture+23.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5299373277814896850" border="0" /></a><br />When I first saw what is now released as <a href="http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html">Google Latitude</a> a few months after joining Google, I'll admit I was a little surprised.<br /><br />I guess my first exposure to this concept was the awesome <a href="http://www.loopt.com/"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Loopt</span></a> presentation at Where 2.0 in 2007.<br /><br />I was a Verizon subscriber at the time, with a clunky Windows Mobile 5 phone and a pain-in-the-butt <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Bluetooth</span> GPS and there was no <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Loopt</span> application or service on my platform.<br /><br />It wasn't until <a href="http://brightkite.com/"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">BrightKite</span></a> came along that I was able to painfully start sending my position out to the world and make stalking me a little easier for everyone.<br /><br />I liked <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">BrightKite</span>, and liked how I was able to integrate the position with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Facebook</span> and even Yahoo's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">FireEagle</span>.<br /><br />I loved the idea of sharing where I was with friends but there was a problem; my friends looked at this technology and said "Dude, that's creepy, I'm not telling you or anyone else where I am all the time."<br /><br />This is a problem - the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">geo</span>-nerd in me loved the concept, and my normal friends hated it.<br /><br />Then, in the spring of 2008, I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">JailBroke</span> my friend's <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">original</span> iPhone, and checked out a rogue app called <a href="http://tapulous.com/twinkle/">Twinkle</a>, a Twitter application with built in GPS / Location support.<br /><br />Instantly, I saw there was a "Nearby" tab, and I saw dozens of folks around me in San Francisco posting pictures, and Tweeting away.<br /><br />This <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">JailBroken</span> iPhone App drove me into an Apple-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Fanboy</span> frenzy and I was hanging on every single rumor about a then-speculated iPhone 3G with even better GPS support.<br /><br />Twinkle worked so well, that I dropped Verizon and got an iPhone 3G the first day it was available and installed 2 applications immediately: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Loopt</span> and Twinkle.<br /><br />Since August, I got 1 friend to join me on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Loopt</span>, and in that time I've checked the "Nearby" tab in Twinkle several times a day.<br /><br />I want to attribute the success of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Twinkle's</span> Spatial Social Networking success to the simple fact that there was more than one reason to launch the Twinkle app, and really only one reason to launch <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Loopt</span>.<br /><br />I was mostly logging into Twinkle to send Twitter updates to my group of followers, but while I was there I always checked out what was being Tweeted around me.<br /><br />It has been really interesting to watch how the Nearby features of Twinkle are being used by iPhone users (a gigantic user base at this point). One nearby <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Twinkler</span> in D.C. explained it to a new user as "a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">chatroom</span> for people you find all around you."<br /><br />This was a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">fundamental</span> different concept than what I had been hearing from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Loopt</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">BrightKite</span>, and it is probably why Twinkle has turned in many cases into a creepy hook-up tool as the popularity surged.<br /><br />So creepy, that I was tricked into clicking on my first NUDE Twinkle user's uploaded picture last week - it was a dude - not cool.<br /><br />Twinkle is almost too big now, but I think people have a taste for why sharing your location can be cool and have started to accept that there are benefits to sharing your location.<br /><br />I think many middle-of-the-road technology users will likely still want to be a little less liberal in their location broadcasting than the users are on Twinkle, so features like limiting your location to trusted friends, and multiple tiers of accuracy settings so people don't know EXACTLY where you are but can at least know what city you're in will be well received.<br /><br />Paul <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Ramsy</span> was <a href="http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2009/02/googlesoft.html">rather miffed</a> by <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Google's</span> Latitude launch, as he viewed the beta as an innovation killer.<br /><br /><blockquote>It's been a while since Google brought out anything truly innovative, but they sure have shown themselves willing to copy the services of upstart companies and try to snatch their markets away</blockquote><br />However, I think the move is decidedly less evil than Paul <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">perceives</span> it.<br /><br />Google has shown a clear interest in a broad spectrum of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">geospatial</span> technologies, and has provided data to hundreds of millions of users that just 4 years ago never would have had access to it.<br /><br />It only makes sense that many <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">geospatial</span> technologies will be explored by Google and in almost every case be improvised on and enhanced by the company and, even more importantly, the users.<br /><br />You can't say Google came to the party late, and is trying to snuff out start-ups, they obviously saw some potential for the basic idea when they bought <a href="http://www.dodgeball.com/"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Dodgeball</span></a> in 2005.....<br /><br />I an also tell you that I had 5 of the 7 friends I invited agree to share their location with me in the first day of the service's launch.<br /><br />Why?<br /><br />Probably because it works with many cell phone models and carriers, and works well with my friend's GMail accounts and their iGoogle, which they are using all day long.<br /><br />I think Twinkle showed that it requires more than a single-purpose app to get people to really utilize spatial social networking, and I think Google has realized this.<br /><br />Tying the feature into a users regular use of things like search, GMail, and other Google Applications looks like a winning formula to spatially enable a gigantic user base.<br /><br />I can only hope that Google looks at the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">FireEagle</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">BrightKite</span> models, which did an excellent job of making the location something that was abstracted from a single application or platform, and something that can tie into many other social network platforms, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Flickr</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Facebook</span>, Picasa, Blogger, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">WordPress</span>, even <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">FireEagle</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">Loopt</span>, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">BrightKite</span>.<br /><br />I think they will.Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-28182267549153006742008-04-15T00:03:00.000-07:002009-02-05T00:23:33.357-08:00Google Earth 4.3 3D StreetView Starts To Solve “Immersive Hotdog ProblemHmmm... This Looks Familiar.....<br /><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2008/04/google_earth_43_first_impressions_a.html"><img src="http://www.gearthblog.com/images/images408/svspheresi.jpg" alt="" height="480" width="620" /></a></p><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2008/04/google_earth_43_first_impressions_a.html">Courtesy Frank Taylor GEBlog.com.</a></p><br />Kinda like what I proposed December 30th, 2007??<br /><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://geosquan.blogspot.com/2007/12/can-you-solve-immersive-hotdog-problem.html"><img src="http://lh6.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fzXVfpbYI/AAAAAAAAAgs/axhIRoneOk8/Slide6.JPG?imgmax=640" alt="" height="480" width="620" /></a></p><a href="http://geosquan.blogspot.com/2007/12/can-you-solve-immersive-hotdog-problem.html"><br /></a><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://geosquan.blogspot.com/2007/12/can-you-solve-immersive-hotdog-problem.html">"Can You Solve The 'Immersive Hotdog Problem'?"</a></p><br />While I contact my lawyer about possible Google royalty checks, it is great to see this capability brought to life - and I really like the blend effect that is presented when you click between each immersive sphere to give the sense of warping / traveling between each position.<br /><br />What would be really fantastic would be for Google to release information on how this is done - particularly if you have an ImmersiveMedia set up of your own - but even if you just have an IPIX system it would be extremely helpful.<br /><br />However, right now it is still more like a peapod than a hotdog - you can jump from pea to pea and turn the sphere into a mercator projected photo, but the true geometry that is collected in each sphere is not being projected out to the correct positions yet to create the solid hotdog.<br /><br />How can we make that work? Is a new PhotoOverlay geometry type needed?<br /><br />Whom do we ask for that? Google or the OGC?Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-44100242126050071222008-01-06T12:58:00.000-08:002009-02-05T00:25:33.357-08:00What Could We Do With 20,000+ "Airborne - Immersive Hotdogs" Over The US Per Day?I just flew in from Miami - and boy did I have an idea.....<br /><br />On my way down to Miami to watch Virginia Tech hand Kansas University a victory in the 2008 Orange Bowl, I set my GPS logger up near my window seat and periodically snapped some shots out of the window.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio3richJQ3lI-tes8V6QAhHW9hE06aPnBNhA2SkfgTnBj06IpTa7C9mhKB-1_yPTCTcDKP0Wn9t-uPu2W4sZbskIJsVAuh43EgNyYpotb31juXZzIxC5CxdYhcma3bfO_oWcE3CQl9TXg/s1600-h/balt2miami.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 620px; height: 465px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio3richJQ3lI-tes8V6QAhHW9hE06aPnBNhA2SkfgTnBj06IpTa7C9mhKB-1_yPTCTcDKP0Wn9t-uPu2W4sZbskIJsVAuh43EgNyYpotb31juXZzIxC5CxdYhcma3bfO_oWcE3CQl9TXg/s400/balt2miami.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5299222711495720498" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p align="center">(Click <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.k.tallon/BaltimoreToMiami" target="_blank">here </a>to view or download the 88 Photo dataset for yourself via Google PicasaWeb.)</p><br /><p align="center">(Click <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.k.tallon/BaltimoreToMiami/photo#map" target="_blank">here </a>to view the interactive Google Maps version.)</p><br /><p align="center">(Or click <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/sean.k.tallon/albumid/5152149388577566113?kind=photo&alt=kml&hl=en_US" target="_blank">here </a>to view the dataset directly in Google Earth.)</p><br /><br />I was pretty pleased with the results, particularly the shots coming in from the Atlantic Ocean, over Miami Beach and into MIA!<br /><br />Hmm... sort of like Microsoft's BirdsEye....<br /><br />And, it got me thinking - could you imagine if instead of 88 shots over 2 hours from one window, I had the ability to record 30 frames per second from 12 lenses 360º around the plane for the full 2 hour flight?<br /><br />That would give me 1,296,000 georeferenced images worth of data .<br /><br />Then I started thinking about an <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2007/11/24_hours_of_air_traffic_never_1.html" target="_blank">NPR piece</a> that I heard back in November that mentioned the scale of the number of flights flown each day across the US.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.gruntdoc.com/pics/USAirTrafficasFlashAnimation_1CF9/planes22.jpg" target="_blank"></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.gruntdoc.com/pics/USAirTrafficasFlashAnimation_1CF9/planes22.jpg" target="_blank"><img style="width: 619px; height: 379px;" src="http://www.gruntdoc.com/pics/USAirTrafficasFlashAnimation_1CF9/planes22.jpg" alt="" /></a></div><br />(Watch a beautiful video by<a href="http://users.design.ucla.edu/%7Eakoblin/bio.html" target="_blank"> Aaron Koblin</a> depicting US Air Traffic Below)<br /><br />[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPv8psZsvIU]<br /><br />So those 1 million + georeferenced images would come from just one of roughly 20,000 flights flown over the US each day...imagine if each of those flights had a similar system!<br /><br />I think this would be fairly easy to accomplish if you took something like the <a href="http://www.immersivemedia.com/" target="_blank">Immersive Media Dodeca System </a>and distributed the sensors around the airplane (maybe as simple as splitting the camera in half along the equator and mounting one half on top and one half on the bottom of the plane, or splitting the lenses out all around the plane.)<br /><br />As far as data processing and storage is concerned, I'm not even sure that capability is possible right now - but imagine all of this data available to update Virtual Earth or Google Earth with near real time immersive imagery from multiple angles and altitudes - all time-stamped so that you could observe changes in construction, population movements, traffic, etc over time.<br /><br />Would the data be collected when the plane lands, or transmitted via some sort of tether to a central processing station?<br /><br />Apparently the latter idea isn't so far fetched, considering that Boeing has reportedly <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CWU/is_2003_Oct_6/ai_108564042" target="_blank">demonstrated a satellite video tether system to the FAA</a> which is intended to broadcast in-cabin video for security purposes.<br /><br />The cost of doing something like this at first would seem to be incredibly high, - the electronics and sensors required currently aren't cheap but if purchased on this scale they may not be too outrageous. However, the platform (commercial airliners) are already flying en masse every day - there is practically no cost associated with the actual flight of the sensors - only in their initial equipment purchase and the infrastructure / storage / processing system.<br /><br />Would it be worth it to the US to try to organize such an effort?<br /><br />How much is currently spent on similar data collection for the USGS and other national agencies - could this capability provide more accurate and denser data than traditional satellite based sensor systems?<br /><br />Then again - I'm having a hard enough time figuring out how to process less than 1 mile of an <a href="http://geosquan.wordpress.com/2007/12/30/can-you-solve-the-immersive-hotdog-problem/" target="_blank">"Immersive Hotdog" along Manasquan, NJ's boardwalk </a>- this "airborne - immersive hotdog" idea probably needs to go on hold for a while :)Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925239108044178055.post-58871952207235262312007-12-30T22:54:00.000-08:002009-02-05T00:29:17.476-08:00Can You Solve the "Immersive Hotdog Problem"?<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh5.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3f2_FfpbZI/AAAAAAAAAg4/WjFvDftMygE/ImmersiveHotdog.jpg?imgmax=800"><img src="http://lh5.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3f2_FfpbZI/AAAAAAAAAg4/WjFvDftMygE/ImmersiveHotdog.jpg?imgmax=800" alt="" height="480" width="620" /></a><br />Alright....what the heck is the Immersive Hotdog Problem??<br /></div><br />There probably is a more elegant description for what I am proposing, but to me the best way I can explain what I am envisioning is this:<br /><blockquote>An Immersive Hotdog is a georeferenced linear collection of immersive photographs which create a seamless immersive environment which can be entered in a Geospatial Exploration System such as <a href="http://earth.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Earth</a>, <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/" target="_blank">Microsoft Virtual Earth</a>, <a href="http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer/index.html" target="_blank">ESRI ArcGIS Explorer</a>, or <a href="http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/" target="_blank">NASA's WorldWind</a>. The shape of these immersive collections roughly resembles a hotdog.</blockquote><br />Imagine if you will, a long hotdog-shaped object lying on the Earth - about 100 feet wide, 100 feet tall, and about a mile long.<br /><br />Now imagine that hotdog-shaped object is lying on the ground in GOOGLE Earth - and it is textured with real ground photography taken from the center of the hotdog.<br /><br />This is the Immersive Hotdog - the source can be from a video camera collection system such as <a href="http://www.immersivemedia.com/" target="_blank">Immersive Media</a>, or from standard immersive photograph collection systems such as <a href="http://www.ipix.com/" target="_blank">iPIX</a>.<br /><br />These collections have existed in stand alone viewers for years, however we haven’t visualized this hotdog yet in a truly 3D environment and I think we should.<br /><br />So I started a little proof of concept experiment on Christmas Eve.<br /><br />I didn’t have a fancy Immersive Media video camera, but I did have an iPIX kit which I borrowed to begin exploring this problem.<br /><br />So, on Christmas Eve I walked down the boardwalk in Manasquan, NJ and took a series of iPIX shots every few houses (and brought along my new trusty<a href="http://www.gpspassion.com/forumsen/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=98663" target="_blank"> QSTAR Solar GPS Bluetooth Data logger</a> to capture the precise location of each shot.)<br /><br />I then returned home and synced the GPS log from the QSTAR logger up to the iPIX fisheye photos using the awesome <a href="http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/" target="_blank">Google Picture Sync (GPicSync)</a> application.<br /><br />Here are the results:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh6.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5VfpbTI/AAAAAAAAAgE/ngB8EncYzbo/Slide1.JPG?imgmax=640" target="_blank"><img src="http://lh6.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5VfpbTI/AAAAAAAAAgE/ngB8EncYzbo/Slide1.JPG?imgmax=640" alt="" height="480" width="620" /></a></div><p align="center">(144 geotagged Raw iPIX Fisheye shots which you can download with full GPS EXIF data <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.k.tallon/ManasquanBoardwalkFisheye" target="_blank">here</a>)</p><p align="center">((Hint: Use the "Download Album" option on the left side to directly download all images to your own Picasa))</p><p align="center">((( Because Google's PicasaWeb supports EXIF data, you can view all of these images on a <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.k.tallon/ManasquanBoardwalkFisheye/photo#map" target="_blank">Google Map here</a>)</p><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh6.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5VfpbUI/AAAAAAAAAgM/jzO0IXlO7c4/Slide2.JPG?imgmax=640" target="_blank"><img src="http://lh6.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5VfpbUI/AAAAAAAAAgM/jzO0IXlO7c4/Slide2.JPG?imgmax=640" alt="" height="480" width="620" /></a></p><p align="center">Each iPIX shot consists of 2 Fisheye shots (180º opposed to one another) which we need to stitch into one Equirectangular image</p><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh3.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5lfpbVI/AAAAAAAAAgU/m-0_bV6aSaQ/Slide3.JPG?imgmax=640" target="_blank"><img src="http://lh3.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5lfpbVI/AAAAAAAAAgU/m-0_bV6aSaQ/Slide3.JPG?imgmax=640" alt="" height="480" width="620" /></a></p><br /><br /><p align="left">Here’s the first problem - each picture is taken at a slightly different time from the corresponding shot so the GPS position wavers a little bit in that time.</p><br /><p align="left">Thats actually a good thing, because what we can do is average out the 2 positions for the pair and find an averaged, perhaps more accurate position somewhere “between” both shots to apply to the single equirectangular shot that we get when we stitch the photos together.</p><br /><p align="left">For example, the 2 shots “exploded” in Google Earth above are only slightly “off” from each other in Lat and Lon, but we would average their positions and apply it to the resulting image below. (The iPIX software currently does NOT offer this option…so the first challenge is to average both positions from the source images and write the average to the EXIF of the resulting image.)</p><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a title="Scene1Equi" href="http://geosquan.wordpress.com/files/2008/01/scene1equi.jpg"><br /></a></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP3aqv3V4_C3FRY3OMULoWhw8T6YEY8d0vsUlIl48qSigK_5eYd2YsyBK5efhpiFMeUfXHR6sEbO2f-1Nz1kCC_6vHntIGtp91wLyshoFq9ZSe5imFglH9fPQOIGXhE05UXJ-H2x9slx0/s1600-h/scene1equi.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 620px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP3aqv3V4_C3FRY3OMULoWhw8T6YEY8d0vsUlIl48qSigK_5eYd2YsyBK5efhpiFMeUfXHR6sEbO2f-1Nz1kCC_6vHntIGtp91wLyshoFq9ZSe5imFglH9fPQOIGXhE05UXJ-H2x9slx0/s400/scene1equi.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5299223188150250114" border="0" /></a><p align="center">(72 Equirectangular Images can be downloaded <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.k.tallon/ManasquanBoardwalkEquirectangular" target="_blank">here</a>.)</p><br /><p align="left">I am thinking that some script could be created with <a href="http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/%7Ephil/exiftool/" target="_blank">Phil Harvey's EXIF Tool</a> to automatically strip the 2 source GPS EXIF locations and average them into the corresponding equirectangular shot?</p><br /><p align="left">We can then take the Equirectangular image and wrap around the Spherical <PhotoOverlay> object in KML 2.2 - which will form the first “end of the hotdog.”</p><br /><p align="left">The best way that I know how to do that today is to use the <a href="http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-earth-photooverlay-download-and_25.html" target="_blank">PhotoOverlay Tool from Digital Urban.</a></p><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh3.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5lfpbWI/AAAAAAAAAgc/Jybz3fZv-C8/Slide4.JPG?imgmax=640" target="_blank"><img src="http://lh3.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5lfpbWI/AAAAAAAAAgc/Jybz3fZv-C8/Slide4.JPG?imgmax=640" alt="" height="480" width="620" /></a></p><br /><p align="left">We can continue to do this with the successive scenes….</p><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh3.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5lfpbWI/AAAAAAAAAgc/Jybz3fZv-C8/Slide4.JPG?imgmax=640" target="_blank"><img src="http://lh3.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fy5lfpbXI/AAAAAAAAAgk/GfZmFdWNQ24/Slide5.JPG?imgmax=640" alt="" height="480" width="620" /></a></p><br /><p align="left">So, if we continue to do this, we begin to “fill the Hotdog.”</p><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://lh6.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fzXVfpbYI/AAAAAAAAAgs/axhIRoneOk8/Slide6.JPG?imgmax=640"><img style="width: 620px; height: 484px;" src="http://lh6.google.com/sean.k.tallon/R3fzXVfpbYI/AAAAAAAAAgs/axhIRoneOk8/Slide6.JPG?imgmax=640" alt="" /></a></p><br /><p align="left">To do this we would need a way to automate the PhotoOverlay tool (it does have a batch process capability), but we also need to be able to define the rotation angle so that the spheres line up properly on the earth.</p><br /><p align="left">Also, many of the spheres I create with the PhotoOverlay tool are way to large. i.e the FOV Near setting is too big.</p><br /><p align="left">Now, the Immersive Hotdog is limited in Google Earth because we are restricted as of right now to use multiple sphere objects, which turns out something more like a pea-pod than a hotdog.</p><br /><p align="left">But, there has been some fantastic development by Microsoft as of late with their photo stitching (<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView.htm" target="_blank">HD View</a>, <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2007/10/18/do-you-use-flickr-then-check-out-windows-live-photo-gallery-beta.aspx" target="_blank">Microsoft Live Photo Gallery</a>, <a href="http://labs.live.com/photosynth/" target="_blank">PhotoSynth</a>, <a href="http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/12/why_google_and_microsoft_should_mer.html" target="_blank">Birdseye 3D</a>, etc.)</p><br /><p align="left">Maybe their developers would have a solution to not only successively build the sphere objects but actually stitch the scenes together seamlessly and create true immersive hotdog objects?</p><br /><p align="left">Or, maybe someone clever out there has an idea on how to do this?</p><br /><p align="left">Please let me know!</p><br /><p align="left"></p><br /><p align="left"></p><br /><p align="left"></p><br /><p align="left"></p><br /><p align="left"></p>Sean Wohltmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05775152130144634071noreply@blogger.com0