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GIS for the Rest of Us: Google Maps, Google Earth and World Wind

Traditional maps are powerful tools, but they are limited in the amount of information they can carry. A good hydrographic chart has soundings and hazards, but not roads or census data. Likewise a city metro map will depict local and express stops, but not schools or pizza joints. In the age of paper, maps were necessarily limited to the amount of information that could legibly be printed on the page.

That has changed. Computers have added another dimension to mapping. In 1967 Roger Tomlinson of the federal Department of Energy, Mines and Resources in Ottowa, Ontario, developed the world’s first operational GIS (geographic information system ) that was used to store, analyse and manipulate data collected for the Canada Land Inventory. In essence, Tomlinson had married a database to a map so that layers of information could be bound to spatial coordinates. Until recently, good GIS tools belonged only to governments and the corporations that could pay for them.

Yesterday afternoon I downloaded the free version of Google Earth and started my own GIS. Google Earth is a viewer that allows you to access terrabytes of satellite and aerial imagery simply by typing an address. Not only can you view the street where you live, but you can create your own personal topography by adding annotations to maps and sharing them with other viewers.

Since Google acquired satellite mapping company Keyhole in October of last year, the subsequent Google Earth offering has been in beta, or testing stage. As with Google Maps, the search engine giant made the API available to developers. What this volunteer army of coders comes up with will likely shape future mapping products from Google. Although, the company is reportedly already working on products for the real estate and travel industries.

Meanwhile, new applications created by tying Google mapping functions to existing databases are popping up all over the net. In San Francisco a group called NextBus has used the Google maps and transit department GPS information to display real-time locations of busses all over Fogtown. Another user has mapped Lewis and Clark’s transcontinental journey onto the Google Earth. Several blogs track the developments. Two of the best are Google Maps Mania and Google Earth Blog.

Google Earth runs in a separate viewer (an 11MB download) whereas Google Maps runs within the browser window. GE users are swapping XML files (actually, XML-based KML, or Keyhole Markup Language files) to present information; while Google Maps webmasters show most of their info with native JavaScript, although XML files can be imported. Both GE and GM are relatively simple to use, which accounts for their popularity.

Because these tools are so new they are a bit sketchy in places. For instance, Google Earth is great for urban areas, but rural locales aren‘t covered in any detail. Also much of the satellite imagery is three years old. However, that will change with the launch of two new DigitalGlobe satellites starting next year. Both geo-imaging orbiters will be capable of ground resolution down to half a meter. Finally, the separate viewer application for GE is a bit awkward. If Google’s computer engineers could recast the viewer as a browser plugin, it would have a much greater utility.

Any article on free satellite imagery would be remiss without mentioning World Wind, NASA’s fabulous viewer. In terms sheer visual information, World Wind blows GE away. World Wind draws on the LandSat libraries, USGS information and Shuttle Radar Topography for incredible bird’s eye views of the earth, and MODIS data, which is updated daily. If NASA provided an open-source API to the public, who knows what would develop.

The Collective Unconscious

This concept has been addressed before, but this is the best realization to date. Slow Wave takes descriptions of dreams from the general public and transforms them into four-panel comic strips.

The artist behind the site is Jesse Reklaw. The result is R. Crumb meets C. Jung in a meta-Berkeley of the mind. I love the strip about Yoda in his underpants.

The Global Encyclopedia

After months of quick references and peripatetic perusals, I’ve finally added my first post to Wikipedia. What’s Wikipedia? “A multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia,” according to their own description. But it’s more than that.

Wikipedia is one of the first working models of a global knowledge repository. Google being the other. Anyone can write an article and anyone can edit Wikipedia. That open-access model partly accounts for its tremendous growth. In a little less that five years the encyclopedia has grown to 800,000 entries in the English version (compared with approximately 50,000 articles in the German, French and Spanish editions). Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

That’s really remarkable when you consider that it took Diderot and his coeditors d’Alembert and Jaucourt 30 years to complete their 28-volume Encyclopedie. Or that Britannica Online, the expanded internet version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has just 66,000 articles. Microsoft’s Encarta cobbles together some 40,000 articles.

Given the level of discourse in your average chatroom, one would not expect high erudition from Wikipedia. Yet, taken as a whole, the level of scholarship is pretty good. For the most part the information in Wikipedia is accurate — and mistakes are quickly corrected. It has been criticized for being consensual rather than credentialed — wide rather than deep. It’s true that many of the articles in Wikipedia are just “stubs” (brief descriptions of topics without much content) but those outlines are gradually being filled in.

Macfarquhar and Bell sought definitive authorities for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Diderot relied upon genius and chutzpa. The Columbia Encyclopedia built its reputation on the massed knowledge of a great university. Wikipedia, on the other hand, was authored by Joe Blow and it basically works.

It’s hard to account for this. My best guess is that while most people don’t know much, everybody knows something. For example, in most quarters my neighbor, Lou, is known as a loud ignoramus. But on the topic of auto body repair he is a recognized authority. In fact, he wrote a book on it. I have a copy. I didn’t ask for it; he gave me one. Between its covers is more than I ever wanted to know about pulling dents and paint jobs. And the world is full of guys like Lou, who can’t wait to tell you all about the thing they know best.

On the continuum of knowledge Wikipedia is certainly a work in progress. But what great encyclopedia is ever finished? If the database of What Is Known were ever sealed it would quickly lose its usefulness. That is Wikipedia’s great strength: the dialectic push and pull of ideas, more than facts alone, that defines what we know.

My Wikipedia entry? Just look up the Nor’easter of 1978.