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Links: LIMA, gCensus, Jobo PhotoGPS, Geograph

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  • The Map Room flags a great press release: The US National Science Foundation, USGS, NASA and the British Antarctic Survey are collaborating on the Landsat Image Mosaic Of Antarctica (LIMA) a project that is part of International Polar Year. The result will be the detailed dataset of Antarctica to date in the public domain, and I can’t wait to see this show up in Google Earth and NASA World Wind — though it will take a few months yet before all is ready.
  • This has been making the rounds of Slashdot and Co., and with good reason: Imran Haque’s gCensus, a US census visualization tool that involved him first writing a Perl library for turning census data into shapes in KML — now open source and part of CPAN as Geo::KML::PolyMap. Imran explains the process in this ExtremeTech article. You can also just dive in. He’s planning to turn much more of the code into open source.
  • Yet another GPS georeferencer for digital cameras: The Jobo PhotoGPS. The write-up of a pre-production model is a bit breathless, but this is what I think it is: An autonomous GPS device that you affix to the flash shoe of a digital SLR camera, so that when you takes a picture, it knows to save the time and location. No, this data does not get written into the EXIF data of the pic in the camera — you have to do that later, on your computer, after both the pics and the GPS data are downloaded. Also, the device promises to have an extremely long life being “only active when needed,” though that makes me wonder how long you need it to find satellites everytime you want to shoot. The above link comes with images.
  • Barry Hunter has upgraded the network link associated with Geograph, the collaborative project for photographing every square kilometer of the British Isles. The KML is all region-based now; writes Barry, “in this way the view starts depicting a course overview of the current coverage, zooming in reveals more detail until pictures themselves become visible”.
  • I love it when a story gets written along the lines of “X finds Y using Google Earth.” In today’s installment, X = a Dutch archaeologist and Y = the lost underwater castle of Hulckesteijn. The story in English, the original story in Dutch, the link to Google Maps, and the link to Google Earth. [Update: Not so fast, says a follow up article, in Dutch. Is too, is the response to the response.]
  • Not sure what this article in National Geographic is getting at: Terrorist Use of Google Earth Raises Security Fears. It all sounds a bit alarmist, and its credibility is marred by this:

    For many locations the images have a resolution as fine as 49 feet (15 meters) per pixel—enough to see individual streets, distinguish buildings, and even make out the color of automobiles.

    It leaves you wondering if the writer understands the notion of resolution… In National Geographic of all places!

  • Valery Hronusov strikes again: The Atlas of Moscow, 1853, as a superoverlay.

4 thoughts on “Links: LIMA, gCensus, Jobo PhotoGPS, Geograph”

  2. I wouldn’t hold your breath for the antarctic imagery to be too useful in either GE or WW. Neither of them use a map projection that works will near the poles. :)

  3. I’ve been working on putting Census data into Google Earth and have just branched out into Federal Election Commission data. This data source is quite interesting and I’ve shared some of the KMZs here.

  4. photoGPS is not ready for sale YET…

    2nd half of 2008 is the word rght now… bummer… it will get smaller and will be mac compatible..

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