[LIS-Forum] Google is Every Where

Roopa E roops_e at hotmail.com
Wed Sep 14 09:58:45 IST 2005


Dear professionals,

Google is coming to the rescue of victims of Hurricane Katrina using Mapping 
Technology. It is evident that google is every where.

In an effort to help displaced hurricane victims and their families, ad hoc 
communities of Internet users are using mapping technologies from Google 
(nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) to track storm damage, analyze aerial photos 
and try to make sense of what little information is available.

Three days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf of Mexico, 
extensive flooding, widespread power outages and general chaos continue to 
prevent residents from returning home, and limit the amount of useful 
information emergency workers or members of the media can distribute to the 
world outside. What little information about individual neighborhoods gets 
out is spotty, at best, and hard to come by--largely from dramatic, but 
ill-defined TV news footage.

"We're seeing a lot of images from New Orleans that lack context," says 
Shawn McBride, a phone switch technician from Spokane, Wash., who has been 
using satellite photos from the Google Earth service to track flooding and 
analyze damage to neighborhoods. "It's impossible to tell from the outside 
how things are."

But along comes Google.

One Web site, www.scipionus.com, is combating the confusion by encouraging 
users to annotate a Google Map of New Orleans with information about 
specific locations. Collectively, the community is creating a collaborative 
map Wikipedia. Anyone with something to add can enter a street address and 
leave a marker on the map at that location, providing a few lines of text 
about conditions at that spot. "Never flooded, typical wind damage, passable 
street 8-31-05," reads one tag. "Trey and April's We are OK ppl," reports 
another.

The site, created by Jonathan Mendez and Greg Stoll, software engineers who 
work together in Austin, Texas, went up Wednesday afternoon, and already has 
attracted nearly 300,000 visitors, who've left more than 600 tags.

Mendez, who grew up in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, La., has family who 
evacuated the area to his home in Texas. "We all were watching the news and 
scouring the Web for any information we could get," he says. "There were 
forums set up for people looking for information on particular areas, but 
they had hundreds of posts with mostly questions and little information, and 
it was hard to read through it all. I kept thinking, 'I wish there were a 
map with all this info, so it would be easy to look this up.'"

The site runs off of the same technology that has allowed Google users to 
keep track of everything from potholes to pizza parlors. In June, the 
company released code that allowed outside developers to use and adapt the 
Google Maps software. In the months since, Google "mashups" of geographic 
data have flourished.

"My friend Greg had played with it to make a map with markers to particular 
locations, so I figured if we could get it so that anyone could add those 
markers straight from the Web, we could get the information on the map 
quickly," says Mendez. "People have said they've found it very useful."

In a separate effort, other Web users have also made use of satellite 
photographs of the region available through the Google Earth service, a 
program which allows users to view satellite photos as if they were flying 
over them, panning, zooming and tilting the image at will. While most of 
those photos depict the area pre-hurricane, the software allows users to 
"overlay" other photos and images. So more recent aerial photos--even 
pictures from news services and solo photographers--can be reshaped and 
dropped onto a satellite map, illustrating the current conditions.

Pleasantville, N.Y.-based editor and blogger Katherine Cramer helped 
popularize the practice, after she noticed similarities between a Google 
Earth shot of the south coast of Lake Pontchartrain, and a news photo 
illustrating a nearly swamped New Orleans neighborhood. "I looked at those 
and said, 'Somebody needs to be putting these images together and comparing 
them.'"

Cramer posted a few thoughts on her Web site, which was linked to by Boing 
Boing, a hugely popular blog, and before long, she was getting e-mails and 
mashed-together images from people around the country. "Suddenly we had an 
impromptu collaborative process, mostly consisting of people I don't know," 
says Cramer.

Shawn McBride made some of the first post-Katrina images, and posted them 
online in the Google Earth Current Events Community, a discussion board for 
users of the system. "Once you have an image that you want superimposed, 
it's kind of like a puzzle," he says. Photo manipulators look for 
distinguishing landmarks that appear in both news photos and the Google 
images--a warehouse with a red roof, for instance--and then stretch and tilt 
the photo until it lines up with the satellite map.

The resulting image is sort of a hybrid overlay that can be directly viewed 
and manipulated in the Google Earth service, allowing users to see recent 
images of their neighborhood, inside the context of the entire city. "It's 
not as good as the original satellite image, but you can get a sense of 
whether a house is underwater or not," says Cramer.

Cramer has posted a series of directions on her site describing how to use 
Google Earth to check out flood damage in New Orleans. "I wanted to come up 
with a process for your average frightened person, who can get at the 
Internet, but is not able to learn new software," she says. "I've had a lot 
of people say they couldn't find this information until they came to my 
site."

Google Earth images with post-hurricane overlays even appeared on television 
Thursday, as a number of news networks used the tool to zoom in and out of 
affected areas to display the damage.

Representatives of Google say they encourage this creative use of their 
mapping technology. "We've been kind of nurturing and growing that for the 
past two years," says John Hanke, former CEO of Keyhole, a digital mapping 
company acquired by Google in October of last year, who now serves as 
general manager of the Keyhole group at Google.

On Thursday, Google began releasing new images of the flooded areas, and 
even posted links to a number of user-supplied image overlays. Hanke says 
the company will continue to make available new images over the next few 
days, and that Digital Globe, their satellite provider, is continuing to 
photograph the area.





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