Computers, Society, and Nature

The wikipedia community has been asked to come up with ideas of what copyrighted items should be freed and made available to the general public. The wishlist is on a meta-wiki (meta-wikis assist the Wiki Foundation in coordinating wikis, such as wikipedia and wikimedia). Wikimedia has the copyright wishlist, which includes newspaper articles and photographs, 20th century sheet music, textbooks, and academic journals (including Web of Science, JSTOR). Here’s the wishlist for freeing up remote sensed images and vector files.

While perusing the list, I came across a term I’d never heard of before: abandonware. Someone suggested that the copyrights to discontinued software be purchased and distributed under a GPL.

Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed software to automatically generate 3 D images from 2 D images. Watch the video and see how they even create the 3 D visualization from a painting.

The press release reports that the software imputes the figure geometry from the straight lines in the image and, I’m guessing from the documentation, also possesses some expert system qualities in understanding objects like ground, shadows, and clouds.

Using machine learning techniques, Robotics Institute researchers Alexei Efros and Martial Hebert, along with graduate student Derek Hoiem, have taught computers how to spot the visual cues that differentiate between vertical surfaces and horizontal surfaces in photographs of outdoor scenes. They’ve even developed a program that allows the computer to automatically generate 3-D reconstructions of scenes based on a single image.
…
the Carnegie Mellon researchers will show that having a sense of 3-D geometry helps computers identify objects, such as cars and pedestrians, in street scenes.

More detail, including the downloadable software, can be found here.

Now, if the software could embed geo-references at various points within the image then we could stitch together some high resolution walk-throughs from separate photos that also could be anchored to map locations. Think of the possibilities for flickr! I wonder what would be the minimum number of pairs of x,y coordinates that the photographers would have to submit as geo tags? We could render aerials as well but we’d have to orient the images to maximize the horizontal and vertical. Also, think of the possibility in taking old hand-drawn maps and street scenes. This could be be a wonderful addition to the work already being conducted on draping images onto digital elevation models.

Place-based mapping sounds like an oxymoron but it’s the only name I can come up with to describe the latest craze in annotating points on a map with stories.

The latest innovation in online mapping is wikimapia. Wikimapia combines wikis and Google Maps by allowing site visitors to annotate and describe places using the Google map user interface.

I’m kind of dubious. It looks like one of these high concept convergence things that venture capitalists jump on (“it combines wikis and Google maps! Oh and let’s throw in flicr too!”). What I’m more interested in is theme specific maps like fluwiki. By narrowing the subject matter, the site developers are more likely to garner content. Wiki sites live or die on the basis of content. I see little impetus to add content to wikimapia to ensure lots of geographic coverage.

Another mashup is The People’s Atlas. The interface is much nicer, combing the feel of flicr and myspace (e.g., one can link to other tags and users). A site visitor can easily add multimedia (I like the incorporation of youtube. Its main usage at the moment seems to be advertising. “The best place to visit while you’re in Garberville is the Tiki Lounge.” So like above, if the site wants to live up to its moniker, the “People’s Atlas,” it requires huge numbers of people to add interesting content.

(On a conspiratorial note, has anyone noticed the subliminal instances of “Google” embossed on Google Maps and Earth layers?)

Greetings! Have just been arm twisted by Renee Sieber to join the modern era and start blogging. So to start, here is a link to some cool images from NASA’s ASTER instrument.

It shows different patterns of cultivation around the world. Contrast the neat squares in Minnesota with the slivers in Bangkok. Also, the new large-scale patterns of cultivation in southern Brazil is striking. How on Earth can one represent such contrasting patterns on one global map as some are trying to do?

[Renee–the slivers are reminiscent of the Seigneurial system that can be found in Quebec. Compare Bangkok to this satellite image of the St. Lawrence river.]

Think of the implications for science on a sphere. I don’t know if a curved touch sensitive screen has been developed but if it has then it could be wrapped around the sphere. What would it be like if people could manipulate images of the globe ON the globe? That would add enormously to greater understanding of global effects. Also of local/global connections. For example, I build a coal mine here. What are the effects for climate change across the globe? The effects might be small but you could change the data on the fly to examine only the incremental changes. That’s only climate change. You could also visualize international money flows or migation patterns. (I’ve got to get me some engineering students to work out the hardware details).

One problem, I see, is in the zooming in/out. Given the physical sphere cannot be expanded, is it the best platform for scaled views? Perhaps we need a combination 3D/ 2D platform. 3D for the global and 2D for the local.

Nothing to do with environment, but the Modern Language Association has a new version of their US map of languages. It’s built on ESRI’s ArcIMS platform and actually has a nice graphical user interface.

On the 40th anniversary of the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the federal government has given a $1million grant to a Texas Law School to determine how to limit the act. The goal is to craft a statute for state governments and the federal government specifying what public data can and cannot be released. That is, specify which public data that is currently accessible should be no longer accessible.

Keep in mind that laws for releasing public information are not uniform state to state. Many states do not have FOIAs, that is mechanisms to automatically release data to the public. Also there have always been restrictions on access for privacy and security concerns. So it’s not like you or I can get any type of public information we want.

Consider the following “harrowing” scenario posed by the professor at the law school who received the grant:

In 2003, he said, a simulated cyberattack on San Antonio’s water and government information systems showed that computer security data that was protected under federal law could have been accessed by terrorists under Texas legislation.

Protecting national security is important; however, there’s been no instance like this in the US. This example is particularly poignant since Texas has one of the best repositories for spatial data that is generated by state agencies. Restrictions on FOIA have horrible implications for access to spatial data. The ostensible reason may be national security but the goal is to write the model law broadly to cover all contingencies. Granted, flexibility is important. But so is transparency and accountability. This won’t be the first time that governments have used restrictions on access to public data as a way to limit exposure to liability, protect special interests, or prevent embarassment. The first victim will likely be environmental protection. You want to protest the extension of the road network because of its adverse envionmental impacts? Sorry, but you can’t get the digital data because access is a “security risk”. Adds the critics:

Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, says the research program is in keeping with a recent federal trend to use “homeland security” as an excuse to restrict unrelated material.

Overall, a poor birthday present for an act that makes the US government so transparent.

How does Google Earth work? Nature Magazine explains the “Short cuts [to] bring the globe to your screen without crashing your computer”.

Google Earth has made the pages of Nature Magazine. The big deal? What it offers researchers, in terms of the third dimension, the accessibility on the web, the ease of use, the bundled imagery, and the ability to share and collaborate on data. And that’s a big improvement on GIS:

With traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software — which was previously the only way to deal with spatial data like these — combining the two data streams would have been a headache. With Google Earth it will be effortless, says Pedersen [a remote sensing specialist at the Technical University of Denmark]: “It provides a very easy interface to a lot of different data.”

The article goes on to say that even though GIS companies like ESRI were “caught napping,” they will be releasing a horde of new products to add onto Google Earth. Indeed, ESRI believes its new entries into the online market will be the Google Earth-killer. My prediction? Too little, too late.

Back to Nature. Go to the article to see the “curtain” of atmospheric data displayed at right angles to the satellite imagery. Cool.

See this other Nature article on Google Earth mashups and the environment.

Missed this post from Stargazer on GIS in space.

If the options for geo-spatial analysis offered by this planet are not satisfying, there is an alternative. GIS is not just being used on Earth but is also being used to map planets across the solar system. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Research Program using datasets provided by NASA has made several maps of space bodies.

After all of NASA’s missions over the years, there is a huge amount of planetary data lying around. That’s where Planetary Data System (PDS) comes into play. According to NASA’s site, PDS “archives and distributes digital data from past and present NASA planetary missions, astronomical observations, and laboratory measurements.” It is sponsored by NASA’s Office of Space Science to make this data available for research and analysis purposes.

PDS is composed of seven different “nodes” of research that analyze specific elements of the huge amount of data provided within PDS. One such node is the Imagining Node, run by the USGS and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This node “provides to the NASA planetary science community the digital image archives, necessary ancillary data sets, software tools, and technical expertise necessary to fully utilize the vast collection of digital planetary imagery.”

So when does GIS come in? USGS has something called Planetary Interactive G.I.S.-on-the-Web Analyzable Database. In addition to being a funny sounding acronym, PIGWAD allows spatial data layers for Venus, Mars, Mercury, the Moon and the Jovian satellites: Io, Ganymede, and Callisto to be downloaded as ESRI shapefiles. This means you can use the data on ArcView! Also available for download is the metadata for each layer, as well as a screenshot of the layer. If you don’t want to download but just take a peep, you can also look at layers and images online using ArcExplorer.

The USGS website also has an awesome program called Map-a-Planet. This allows you to make customized maps of several planets with a click of a mouse that are then available for download. This site uses cartographic software called MapMaker to make maps out of Planetary Data System layers and images. It has three levels of functionality, so GIS novices can use the easy version whereas GIS nerds (like us) can use the advanced version.

If you want to map not only individual planets but the whole sky, you can download a program called AV_STARS which is a Celestial Mapping Project for ArcView.

Happy Space Mapping!