Microsoft Breathless About Latest, Largest Imagery Update to Bing

Our MS PR contact e-mailed to tell us about Chris Pendleton’s blog post. Interestingly, MS didn’t e-mail us about the Navizon deal noted earlier this week.

Last month we pushed out our largest amount of new imagery EVER in terms of square kilometers. This month, we’re blowing THAT record out of the water. You thought 1 million+ sq. km. was large? How about 6.7 million square kilometers! It’s pretty much unfathomable. The big winners? Aerial: The Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the US where we had black and white imagery. Bird’s Eye: Sweden.

Harris Steps Up to Fund Geospatial Revolution Project

Also noted: “Release of the first episode is planned for mid-September 2010.”

Disclosure: I’m an advisor on the project.

- press release
- Geospatial Revolution Project

DNI to Crowdsource a “Safe Routes through Afghanistan” App

Or at least that what I understand from Greg Gardner, deputy chief information officer for the Director of National Intelligence who spoke a lunch in Pentagon City hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association yesterday.

DNI envisions a system in which individuals from nondefense groups and military members can type in their location, the route they plan to take and their intended destination to retrieve the latest information on surroundings.

“I’m at Camp Alpha, and I’m going to Town Eagle” the user would enter into a protected unclassified system, and then retrieve a graphic display of a safe route through the country, Gardner explained.

“We’re thinking in terms of Web 2.0 social networking in ways that we haven’t done before,” he said, adding the approach will mean accepting some risk in return for knowledge of much greater value to information sharing. The network is in limited use, Gardner said in an interview with Nextgov, but he could not comment on when it would launch officially.

The application would work like a wiki—a Web site that any user can edit—“so you get this growing base of current knowledge,” he said at the lunch. It would communicate safety information and mission-critical details, such as the last time a public health team visited the town or the amount of money that governments have invested nearby schools.

- NextGov

GIS Used to Help Decrease Stroke, Heart Disease, and Cardiovascular Risk 25%

Ten years ago the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association (AHA/ASA) committed to a reduction of 25% in stroke, heart disease, and cardiovascular risk. And, they achieved it! How? A new report chronicles the systematic changes required. Among them: GIS.

Another interesting development has been the use of new kinds of information technology to understand how to attack the problem, he [Lee Schwamm, MD, from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, cochair of the writing committee on the report] said. “GIS mapping — geospatial information mapping — has turned out to be a very powerful tool to identify disparities in care, based on geographic factors or patient characteristics, such as race/ethnicity, age, or socioeconomic means. Now, because we can overlay this information onto maps of the US, along with regional death rates and the location of stroke centers, we can identify regions of the country that need special attention and resources.”

For example, he said, it might appear that there are a lot of stroke centers in the Northeast, but there is also high population density and a lot of patients in the Northeast. “When you look at a map absent those other key geospatial variables, you might think stroke care is disproportionately distributed in this country,” Dr. Schwamm points out. Many areas with fewer stroke centers also have very lower population density, he added, “so maybe we’re doing better than it first appears.”

- Medscape

Helping the UN Help Haiti Via GISCorps

Christopher G. Markuson, GISP, the GIS Manager of Pueblo County, Colorado took on another full time GIS job last month. He and Graham Smith, the Geomatics Coordinator from the Grand River Conservation Authority in Cambridge, Ontario are both working with the UN-SPIDER team in Bonn, Germany through GIS Corps. The goal: to help get the UN’s GIS up and running for Haiti and perhaps Chile.

The United Nations effort is starting from almost nothing in Haiti because the country had only one geographic information worker before the earthquake, in which she died. Many of the country’s electronic maps don’t show the names of roads or where hospitals are located.

  Markuson and a team of nine other experts around the world have created the system and showed the agency what computer servers to buy to upgrade its abilities to deal with complicated mapping and other geographic information.

- Peublo Chieftain