Update 3: Letter on BP Oil Spill GIS Appears, Disappears

Matt Ball interviewed Drew Stephens of the GIS Institute twice to get his perspective on his work as a contractor on the oil spill GIS, the letter that was posted and removed, and how things are moving ahead in his work with the BP Oil Spill and his other project, related to mapping plastic pollution in the oceans.

Ball informs me the letter in question is currently hosted here.

- Vector1

—- update 6/17/10——

Brian Denzer who worked with the two letter writers posts his observations at Geowanking.

Further, back on 6/13 Drew Stephens responded on a mailing list about the letter being taken down from his site: ” I took the letter off The GIS Institute site personally, as I feel the problem has been stated, and it’s time to work on solutions.”

Also noteworthy on Geowanking:

Ian Turton notes that all the data from Geoplatform.gov is accessible via WMS (though you need to dig into the page source to find the source info).

William Keever notes that the BP app allows for download of data “via an open AGS rest api.” I found this listing.

Chris Schmidt notes you can get KMLs from the BP app. As beset I understand you do that via the listing I note above - the page looks like this.

via O’Reilly Radar

—- update 6/15/10—-

Patrick Lockerby (who some have already nominated for a Pulitzer) provides this update on the letter’s disappearance:

I have been led to understand that the open letter was taken down because the responses it attracted imposed to great a workload on the GIS Institute team.

I can assure my readers that there was no pressure placed on the site by any person or organisation to remove the letter.

There is no conspiracy surrounding the unpublishing of the open letter.  Period.

- Blog comment dated yesterday
I’ve seen nothing further regarding the proposal referred to below.

——original post 6/14/10——

Last week I received a tweet about an open letter related to GIS for the gulf oil spill. It raised many questions (and is quite dense!). Over the weekend the letter disappeared from the website. Now a new note from one of the authors appears where it had been. It discusses a new proposal effort and a viewer on the PB site for GIS data.

Here are some sources for those who want to follow up.

- BP, GIS And The Mysterious Vanishing Open Letter
- Disturbing Possibility: Is the Gulf Oil Disaster Data Behind a BP Corporate Firewall?