Wednesday, March 7. 2007

Imagery Blackout-"We can't tell you...it's a secret"

At GITA, Dr. Bill Gail of Microsoft's Virtual Earth team addressed a question as to working with highly sensititve imagery of perhaps a national security concern and whether they might be asked to black out areas on Virtual Earth. Google had been asked to do this previously for certain areas and Microsoft wanted to preempt such situations. Gail said that Microsoft has sat down with various government agencies to ask them about these potential conflict areas that they thought might be blacked out if asked to do so. Their answer was, "it's a secret, we can't tell you."

Quote of the day: "GIS for the other 80% of the people in the world"

I asked Raj Singh of the OGC what he envisioned was the most beneficial utility of GeoRSS for the short term, given that GeoRSS is a relatively new encoding scheme.

"It's GIS for the other 80% of the people in the world." He went on to say that he believed that it was most useful in a sensor environment to monitor, for example, traffic sensors, geophones for earthquake monitoring, or video feeds from fixed location cameras.