The Amazonian Street View

With Google Street View, you can do amazing things such as hike around Stonehenge or even ski down Whistler’s slopes—all without leaving home. Soon, you’ll be able to float down the Amazon and Rio Negro Rivers of northwest Brazil and experience some of the most remote and biodiverse areas in the world.

A few members of our Brazil and U.S. Street View and Google Earth Outreach teams are currently in the Amazon rainforest using our Street View technology to capture images of the river, surrounding forests and adjacent river communities. In partnership with the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon (FAS), the local non-profit conservation organization that invited us to the area, we’re training some of FAS’s representatives on the imagery collection process and leaving some of our equipment behind for them to continue the work. By teaching locals how to operate these tools, they can continue sharing their points of view, culture and ways of life with audiences across the globe.

We’ll pedal the Street View trike along the narrow dirt paths of the Amazon villages and maneuver it up close to where civilization meets the rainforest. We’ll also mount it onto a boat to take photographs as the boat floats down the river. The tripod—which is the same system we use to capture imagery of business interiors—will also be used to give you a sense of what it’s like to live and work in places such as an Amazonian community center and school.

Image of the Tumbira community in the Rio Negro Sustainable Development Reserve

In this first phase of the project, the Google and FAS teams will visit and capture imagery from a 50km section of the Rio Negro River, extending from the Tumbira community near Manaus—the capital of the state of Amazonas—to the Terra Preta community. We’ll then process the imagery of the river and the communities as usual, stitching the still photos into 360-degree panoramics.

Image of the Tumbira Community

For many outdoor enthusiasts, travelers and environmentalists, this creates an opportunity to experience the wonders of the Amazon, which will be accessible in a way they’d previously only dreamed about. We’re honored to work with FAS on this project to bring the Amazon online for those who can’t visit in person, and help our partners share with the world the unique stories of its inhabitants and the beauty of this place they call home. 

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Journey in Google Earth

Last year, Laura Hillenbrand released a book titled “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption“, based on the life of Louis Zamperini (details on Amazon). The book has been very popular, quickly becoming a best-seller and recently being picked up by Universal Studios to be turned into a movie.

The life of Zamperini is amazing, and the book is excellent. Zamperini, a world-class runner that competed in the Berlin Olympics in 1936, is drafted into World War II. He fights a number of missions before his plane goes down and he’s trapped in a raft at sea. After 46 days at sea, he floats into the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands, and he’s placed in various POW camps for the next few years.

In reading the book about his journey, I realized that it would pretty cool to track down his various missions and POW camps in Google Earth. I was right! However, I was unable to find a decent timeline of his life, so I spent a few hours researching it and created one myself. After that, I did more research to find all of those locations in Google Earth and ended up with a pretty cool file.

zamp-hawaii.jpg

The file includes locations from his early days (homes, school), the various places he went for military training, the Pacific missions he completed, the POW camps he was placed in, and the various stops on his journey home. You can download the KMZ file here to try it for yourself.

I had hoped that historical imagery might come into play with this, but the old imagery in the Pacific and Japan doesn’t go back nearly far enough (as opposed to Europe, where many locations have historical imagery dating back to the mid-1940′s). However, one good example was Hamilton Field, where he stopped over on his way to Hawaii. The present-day imagery no longer shows a runway, but if you switch to the 1993 imagery you can clearly see the runway still there.

hamilton-field.jpg

All of that being said, I’m sure the file isn’t perfect. If you make any corrections to it, please email me the updated version (mickey@gearthblog.com) and I’ll update this post.

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Making Data Accessible – Or Why TIGER/Line Is Now on WeoGeo

Getting at Free Data

I’ve talked quite a bit over the past few years about how one can make data easily accessible and usable by users. TIGER/Linehas been one of my biggest examples. The web interface is a nightmare in usability and the FTP site is hard to use (and who really wants to download 150 GB of data?) unless you’ve got those FIPS codes memorized. There has to be a better way to access this data.

OK So Let’s See What This Thing Can Do

When I joined WeoGeo almost 2 years ago, we were working on adding vector support to the already powerful raster customization options. We’ve had vector support for a while now, but only recently had we added what we call ToC support so that you can manage large datasets such as this TIGER/Line 2009. ToC gives WeoGeo the ability to deliver many different shapefiles (or any other supported data type) as individual layers allowing someone to customize their order. In the case of TIGER, one could only get the hydro layer and only have to download that dataset. This means that you don’t need to get gigabytes of data to access lakes in your area of interest. One could of course download everything, but many times you just need one part of the dataset.

So I Work Across County Boundaries

TIGER County data is of course organized by county.  In many regions, the reasons why these county boundaries were created have no bearing on reality or the facts on the ground.  So organizing data by county might make sense to some mathematician sitting in a cubicle in the bowels of some government building, but to those of us who need to work with the data it is nothing but an impediment to building our products.  The ToC (which is just a JSON file) gave us the means to offer up TIGER/Line 2009 data for the USA. Unlike the TIGER/Line website, you can easily select across counties and states for your data in one download. If I want Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA, it is a simple order. I don’t have to navigate through Oregon to Multnomah County and then back out to Washington and THEN back down to whatever county Vancouver, WA is in (seriously how do you figure that out on their website?). The clicks involved are just nuts.

Get Multiple County TIGER Downloads for Free

Take this example below; I can order all the TIGER/Line data between New York City and Philadelphia (including all those counties in New Jersey), select only the layers I want, clip it to my area of interest, re-project it and even deliver it in another format (such as TAB files).

How many trips through the TIGER/Line website would it take to grab all that data?

Grab only the TIGER layers you want, leave the junk behind.

Thus, WeoGeo is now hosting the entire TIGER/Line 2009 (TIGER/Line 2010 will come out as more states are added) for everyone to use. Because this dataset is about 150 GB, we are subsidizing the cost of hosting and delivery ourselves for basically anything smaller than the State of New Jersey1. This means that I can grab the Los Angeles Metropolitan area and get every TIGER/Line shapefile for free. Not a bad resource considering that you can place that order in less than one minute.

What is that? Census data for like 17 million people. For free!

So Yea, I’m Excited

Yup! Having the TIGER/Line 2009 Layers in WeoGeo and making it available free to users solves some of the problems I’ve seen with federal data sharing websites. While I do think hosted basemaps such as Bing and Google Maps are the future, having some free local data is still very valuable to those who need data unencumbered by licensing. And you can use our REST API to access this data outside of the website or with our MapInfo and ArcGIS connectivity.

Amazon put TIGER/Line 2008 on AWS a couple years ago and then let it die.  We’ll keep our archive of 2009 and soon 2010 up for those who need it in the Amazon Cloud.

In addition, we’ve got lots of other datasets available for free on our Market including the whole FCC geo-database, natural hazard rankings, National Land Cover and Natural Earth Data. If you’ve got some good suggestions of free data that we should be including in our WeoGeo Market, please don’t hesitate to contact me via my email address which is located at the top of the sidebar on the right.

1: As much as I’d love to let you all download the whole thing as much as you wish, I still have my son who wants aniPad this Christmas. We just want to cover our costs here.

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WikiLeaks asking for help

Portal WikiLeaks called on his supporters worldwide to provide emergency technical assistance to maintain the existence of a site on the Internet.This is stated in the published through the information network on Twitter address the management of WikiLeaks, ITAR-TASS.

“We are subjected to a powerful attack. To stay in the global network, we need your cooperation, “the statement said.

This refers to assistance in the form of so-called”Mirror sites” which copied the information distributed by WikiLeaks, and forward it in parallel channels. As a result of those operators who are trying to close the Web portal, the emergence of numerous “mirror sites” creates insurmountable obstacles.

You will recall that after downloading the WikiLeaks of the servers on Amazon for less than two days had blocked access to Swiss and French “mirror” of the site, later Swiss resumes. So for the time portal is available under the domain. Ch,. Fi and. De.

Meanwhile, British media reported that the founder of the Julian Assange site is located in a suburb of London and can be arrested within the next 48 hours warrant issued by Interpol at the request of Sweden.In response Assange said that in the event of his arrest or permanent closure of WikiLeaks the Internet will be published TOP SECRET material, affecting the interests of the United States and other countries.

Last week the site WikiLeaks revealed secret correspondence of the U.S. Department of State to U.S. embassies around the world, which were then partially published by several leading media. Italy’s foreign ministry has called such materials “11 September in international diplomacy.”

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