[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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