Friday, December 29. 2006

"Remote Sensing for the People by the People"

Roland Piquepaille writing at his ZDNet blog on Emerging Technologies reviews work at Texas A&M University (TAMU) to use balloons to take wide area aerial imagery that matchs that of say DigitalGlobe. Igor Carron, Assistant Director of the Spacecraft Technology Center at the school worked with students to capture and stitch together the imagery. That's neat. I like that we are going back to our roots here in aerial imagery: balloons and kites...

Now, the important socialogical point is articulated by Carron this way: "traditional GIS will be replaced by user fed data and applications." Clearly, that's already begun with mashups and Sketch-Up and the like. This is a different order of magnitude, but in the same ballpark.

From a business perspective, will hosters of data sets seek out and partner with these sorts of projects? Will they help fund them? Will these datasets end up in the public domain? Will they find a home at World Wind? How will the data be cataloged for search? Welcome to 2007!

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One analogy is the growing grassroots weather observation networks such as CoCoRaHS (www.cocorahs.org) and others worldwide. A huge network of trained people using verifiable instruments can cost-effectively collect basic climate data with support from the “professionals” (aka NOAA), so what about other observations?

#1 Tim Case on 2006-12-29 10:57 (Reply)

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