Tuesday, January 23. 2007

Should all imagery be free? Or more freely available?

Satellite image data is free because we get it for free on Google Earth, right? Wrong. We pay with our attention, so says Michael Blakemore of the University of Durham in the UK. He views this as an indirect payment system because our attention is diverted to see advertising.

This is fine with Matt O'Connell, CEO of GeoEye who says that, "A more compelling issue should be that imagery should be more freely available." O'Connell is trying to figure out how to crack the huge Indian market for satellite imagery. "The demand is high because India has a high familiarity with geospatial information." And when GeoEye-1 is launched this summer yielding .41meter panchromatic and with accuracy within three meters without ground control points, the satellite will be collecting over 700,000 square miles per day. GeoEye will have to outsource the production capability because their existing facilities do not have enough capacity even with their combined facilities from Space Imaging that now include St. Louis, Washington DC, and Denver. GeoEye is in discussion with companies in India to acquire more capacity.

And Michael Jones, CTO of Google Earth?" To Google, geography is simply better context to foster human understanding. But in the Indian marketplace, they've run into some sensitive issues. There are certain security concerns. Yet the country badly needs freedom to access image data. "India is forced to deal with reality; it doesn’t have time to wait for style," says Jones. "Our job is not to display the world’s geographic information; it is to display the world’s information and use geography as a context."

But neither is Google waiting for the Indian government to grant them permission to display data. Have you checked out the road network for Hyderbad or the rest of India? Go to maps.google.com and type in this lat/long: 17.47320°N 78.37330°E. It doesn't come from the Indian government. "I can’t tell you how we did it…but we did it," says Jones.

Posted by Joe Francica in Map World Forum 2007 at 12:02 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Hi Joe,
Thanks for covering the event, It's very interesting to see how things are changing in India. Satellite imagery has many other uses such as environmental applications etc which take into consideration - radiometric resolution etc as you may already be aware.

While it's true that the common man doesn't need that information, thats what makes the data expensive. I doubt if google purchases the whole satellitle image (with different layers, they may just purchase the rights for a color image as an overlay, atleast thats what they are doing now ..I'd imagine) and that might have made the deal cheap with Digital Globe et al.

But your coverage opens up a new box, google indeed might have purchased the whole data sets, because the streets that you were seeing in Hyderabad are definitely a clear example - it can only be done 3 ways, (1) map it manually with a GPS, (2) create an automated delineation process that would create a street layer using radiometric resolution (3) pay some one to digitize it! geez! not a fun job for the geeks at google atleast..

I would'nt see google doing (1) with the kind of resources they have, they must have had one of their engineers pull a trick writing the delineation algorithm....which is'nt that tough..

It'd be interesting to see how data the Intel Inside is going to make money once it's democratized by Google..

Thanks,

Shree..

#1 Shree.. (Link) on 2007-01-23 14:38 (Reply)

Hi All

Shree has some very valid comments, as does Matt O'Connell. The buzz at the moment from all the boffin's is for free everything.
Now before you all start putting your fingers to the keyboard I am not in dissareement on the subject as I too would relish at the opportunity to have this data for free. You may think that because the data (imagery etc) has been acquired by a government agency, as a tax payer you should be entitled to it for free. Inthis thought process you may not have considered that there may have been large amounts of money invested in to its acquisition. Many private investors contribute to the funds and do expect some return on their investments, as you do when you put your money in the bank.
What needs to be looked at to either disseminate freely or extend the accesssability of all this data is to propose financial life cycles on data acquisition. Once a piece of data has reached a milestone in its financial life cycle it is released for purchase and so on until it is eventually free or free by subscription. This I believe will make a win win solution for all. The next question would be how to implient such a system.
No I am not an investor, just a mere spatial scientist who will not undersell his science or what it delivers.

Regards,

Mark (Feds)

#1.1 Mark Fedden on 2007-01-24 16:19 (Reply)

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