The Earth Is Square

Ok, this is just getting a little strange... Google is a company that can basically do what they want.   They chose to update some imagery of New Orleans to older imagery to show what the area use to look like.

But because of this.. even now the government is asking why according to CNN.

 The House Committee on Science and Technology's subcommittee on investigations and oversight on Friday asked Google Inc. Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt to explain why his company is using the outdated imagery.

That is just a bit much IMHO.  Just point everyone that wants the imagery to NASA World Wind and the 2005 Hurricane Imagery and everyone can go back into their happy places

This PDF from the NGA is an interesting read if you want to know how the US Government wants to keeps it's data formatted and served.  One thing you will notice that is absent from this document: Google Earth's KML. They want to use open standards and WMS, WFS and GML are in.

The NSG Functional Manager endorsed a set of key specifications known collectively as the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) 1.0 baseline.

Here is a list of the Open Standards they are endorsing:

• Web Features Service (WFS)
• Web Map Service (WMS)
• Web Map Context (WMC)
• Web Coverage Service (WCS)
• Geography Markup Language (GML)
• Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD)
• Catalog Services (CS-W)
• Filter Encoding Specification (FE)
• ISO 19115 Geographic Information - Metadata
• ISO 19119 Geographic Information - Services
• NSG Feature Data Dictionary and NSG Feature Catalog

Ok, more human now to write this up.  Yesterday was a very interesting day.. probably the most interesting one to date.  And let me say.. I don't like getting up at 3am to get to a 6am flight. :)  And once I got to the D.C. area.. it took an hour to go 14 miles because of a wreck, it just so happened that I was taking a Super Shuttle van myself to get to the conference.

Not going to go too much into the presentations I saw.. they were all mostly over my head and I didn't really take any notes, though for the last one I saw.. I wish I had.

My presentation went well enough.  I covered my slides (though I went through them fairly quickly.. too quickly I think.. was nervous as all hell) and went into a World Wind demo and showed some of the stuff you could do, but because of a lack of net access.. I had to do just offline examples.  Most of the people there had not heard of World Wind before, or just knew of it but had not tried it.  They did know Google Earth though.. and that sparked some interesting conversations (and from the gist of the British Military members that were present.. they were not keen on the program or the imagery) that luckily.. I didn't have to get too deep into.

A few questions of security with connections and data did come up and how to have secure transfers.  And i pointed out how WW.Net works but that more likely WWJava would offer up the control and abilities that they would require.

Though I think my working position hampered things a bit.  On the handouts they have me as NASA, but I don't work for or contract to NASA.  So that proposed a bit of a problem for some people in wanting to communicate to me.  Either they couldn't then or they could not tell me as much.  Several people were interested in WWJava and I have already put them in contact with the people at NASA.

The one group that I did talk to also brought me over to their office to meet people there and see what they are working on.  They were keenly interested in WWJava for being the engine behind what they are developing (a "3D World" is as close as I will describe it).

Afterwards they even gave me a lift back to the airport and all but offered me a job.  Was a very interesting time and I am sure some new developments for World Wind will come up out of this.

All Points Blog and The Map Room are both covering this story about Google replacing the flooded New Orleans with pre-hurricane imagery, and how it is angering some people. It is Google's call.. and they can do anything they want.

You can get the Katrina imagery in World Wind with the 2005 Hurricane Add-on. You can also get hurricane imagery from Rita and Ophelia. I believe the GE imagery was the same NOAA flyover imagery that World Wind has, and World Wind also has the USACE flyover imagery (which I think looks better).

Been up since 3am... dead tied.

Full writeup tomorrow.

Was very interesting, even if most of it was over my head.

Got point to this on the #worldwind IRC channel.. it is a list of projects that the Free Software Foundation considers VERY important.

Especially.. this one:

Develop a free compatible client for Google Earth. (The Google Earth client is non-free specifically in order to impose Digital Restrictions Management.) This project requires reverse engineeering, talk with us for advice before you start.

This was tried... remember "Gaia"? Google slammed the door on thier toes.

So, I would like to point them to this Open Source and FREE Virtual Globe. I hear it has been around since 2004 and has a cross platform Java version in Alpha testing now. And there is also ossimPlanet which is also free and open source.