Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Today Google will release a new version of Google Earth that allows Internet users to view the skies as seen from Earth. This new service called Sky allow users to fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

The Sky imagery was stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.

Google said that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.

Spotted on the New York Times and Olge Earth.

November 7th, 2006 is the day for the U.S. mid-term election. On this day, people across the country will exercise their rights to vote and choose their representatives. With advanced GIS technology, this year you can view election competitions on digital maps.

1. Election 2006: Competitive House race (from MarketWatch.com)
2. Google Earth Election Map (see it in your Google Earth application)

Additional election coverage can be found on CNN and the U.S. Depeartment of State websites.

BTW, people have dreamed about an election mash-ups a year before. From Copia in Oct. 2005,

With all the talk of Web mash-ups, I wonder whether anyone has any sort of site or tool for overlaying elections district information over mapping services. I suppose one big problem is that there isn’t much commercial prospect for such a service, but surely this would be a prime candidate civic service mashups, funded by government or philanthropies. Another question is whether districting information is available in computer-readable form regular enough for inexpensive implementation of such overlays.

Guardian Solutions, a Florida-based video surveillance solution provider, has developed a new software product that uses Google Earth to display 3D models of video surveillances intelligence.

This new product, GView (TM), is aimed to provide the mass market an effective tool to gain the benefits of situation awareness — e.g.,stopping vandalism and defeating malicious activities such as sabotage and terrorism.

While I was digging for GView screenshots, I found few interesting clips of the company’s video surveillance technology.

• Tracking a boat in the sea
• Tracking traffic movements in the dark
• Tracking intruder
  
• Directional movements detection

GeoSpatial Expert, a company specializes in developing software for GPS cameras and geotagged digital photos, announces the release of GPS-Photo Link 4.0 that add Google Earth functionality.

A key business of the company is selling GPS camera bundles. For example, their GeoExplorer Bundle comes with a GPS camera and software for processing geotagged photos. The GPS camera supports wireless communication over Bluetooth (i.e., receiving GPS signals from a Bluetooth GPS module).

As location-based technology enters the mainstream consumer market, I think we will see more wide usage of GPS cameras and applications of geotagged digital photos. Though I think many people (including me) would be interested to buy a set of those GeoExplorer Bundles, but I think its price ($3000-$6000) is a bit too expensive for an average consumer.

Gigi and I are on vacation in Hong Kong for two weeks. The main purpose of this trip is to visit our families, do a lot of shopping and eat a lot of good food. Since the Hong Kong Tourism Board is naming this year “2006 Discover Hong Kong Year”, let me do some citizen duty by marketing Hong Kong tourism using Google Earth.

There is not much Hong Kong landmarks in Google Earth. I spent few minutes going through the satellite photos and found few places that I think a typical tourist may be interested to visit.

This Google Earth KMZ file describes the following Hong Kong landmarks:

• Hong Kong International Airport
• Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
• Ocean Park
• Happy Valley Racecourse

Once you’ve opened the file in Google Earth, click on the “link” node under each landmark entry. It will bring you to a Wikipedia page that talks the history background of each landmark location.

See this site for more Hong Kong tourism information.

People can love and hate Google Earth at the same time.

If companies want to put up big advertisement on a billboard down the street, they probably have to pay for it. Thanks to Google’s satellite aerial photo products such as Google Earth and Google Maps. Companies now have a new way to advertise.

Google Earth also reveals a lot of information that governments don’t want you to know. For example, what exactly was going on at Glasgow Prestwick airport the day the Google sat passed over? See “Google Earth fingers CIA rendition flights?“

People love Google Earth, but their governments may not. New York Times reports that the growing popularity of Goolge Earth has many governments worried. For example,

India, whose laws sharply restrict satellite and aerial photography, has been particularly outspoken. “It could severely compromise a country’s security,” V. S. Ramamurthy, secretary in India’s federal Department of Science and Technology, said of Google Earth. And India’s surveyor general, Maj. Gen. M. Gopal Rao, said, “They ought to have asked us.”

I believe in the free use of information, including geospatial data. Should new technology enables everyday people to become GIS specialists, that would be great. If geospatial technology can solve many of our everyday problems, there is no reason to keep them behind the closed doors.

Should new technology threaten national security, we will develop new solutions to overcome this problem. That’s how we as a society has advanced in the past, and I believe that’s how we will continue to do so in the future.