A group of UCLA geographers published a paper yesterday in the MIT International Review entitled “Finding Osama bin Laden: An Application of Biogeographic Theories and Satellite Imagery”. The UCLA team used purely open source data, including “Landsat ETM+, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Defense Meteorological Satellite, QuickBird”. Then used a variety of commons geographic analysis techniques, “distance-decay theory, island biogeography theory, and life history characteristics” to predict high probability locations for Osama Bin Laden. The story has already been picked up by 90 media outlets and has been popping up on the front page of several major news outlets.

It would never make it out of the labyrinth of classification schemas in the US government, but it would be fascinating to see what a crowdsourced search for Bin Laden would turn up if better data was made available from the intel/defense community. Since the government data will never be released we thought we could at least help make the open source data easily accesible. So, we took the available data in the MIT article plus relevant data on Afghanistan and pushed it into GeoCommons. We’ve embedded a map with our own take below.

To view this map in GeoCommons Maker! click here.

In addition to the UCLA data we’ve added gridded population data for the area. A big part of the UCLA thesis was Osama would be, “in a larger town rather than a smaller and more isolated town where extinction rate would be higher”. So, the gridded data gives a rough view of population densities in the remote Tora Bora region.

Source data for the maps is here:

Structure Locations of Possible Hiding Spots of Osama Bin Laden, Parachinar, Pakistan, 2009
Tora Bora 10 KM Buffer Rings
Gridded Population Data, Afghanistan and Pakistan border near Tora Bora

Would be great to see what other folks can do with the data to promote other perspectives. Also a nice opportunity to show the power of opening data up for better analysis, QA and alternative perspectives. Kudos to the UCLA team - great to see geographers in the news for doing what they do best.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Steve Chilton of Middlesex University recently created a cool map in GeoCommons comparing street coverage for OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Google/TeleAtlas in several cities across the globe. It provided a fascinating perspective and thought it would be cool to share it with the community.

The project began with work by Bernard Zwischenbrugger to visually compare coverages between OSM and Google/TeleAtlas. Then Alex Mauer picked up the ball and did a numerical analysis of coverage. Steve then took Bernard’s original visual comparison (location data) and Alex’s scoring (numerical comparison) and produced a map to visualize the results of the comparison:

The size of the circles are proportional to the values for both, so small circles equal poor coverage and large circles equal good coverage. The overlap of the circles shows who appears to be doing better (orangey/brown showing means that osm is doing better, blue google). OSM is the top layer so a tie will have OSM looking better, but you can click the layers on and off to see both views of the coverage.

Alex’s original assessment was that OSM is slightly ahead of Google/TeleAtlas worldwide and in in Africa and Asia. In Europe, OSM is well ahead. Google is slightly ahead in Oceania, and well ahead in North and especially South America.

Steve would have liked to be able to show results on a combined scale from +5 (for osm 5, google 0) to -5 (osm 0, google +5), with 0 for equal, but we do not yet ha ve a bi-polar colour scale for point data in the software. A great suggestion for future development.

It will be interesting to see how Google’s launch of MapMaker for 162 countries will impact this comparison in the future. Many thanks to Steve for loading the data into Finder and making cool maps with it.

Popularity: 36% [?]

With the elections over I’ve had a little time to think about what the new administration could mean for the GeoWeb. For those who follow the GeoWanking list serv there has been a raging debate on neogeography versus paleogeography. Some of the rhetoric reminds me of the just finished election and how we strive to create a binary world - blue state/red state or neo/paleo. In the spirit of moving beyond stereotypes and on to solving problems; I thought a closer look at what the potential impact of Obama’s technology platform on the GeoWeb could be. Might be a good diversion from our own self reflection - despite the fact I’ve added plenty of fuel to that fire

You can read Obama’s technology platform overview here. The plank that really grabbed my attention was the promise to “Open Up Government to its Citizens”. The idea that data about government (Congressional voting records) and created by the government (census data) should be easily available to the public. Specifically:

“Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities. Greater access to environmental data, for example, will help citizens learn about pollution in their communities, provide information about local conditions back to government and empower people to protect themselves.”

The beauty is that we (the collective GeoWeb) have so many of these tools already built. The ability to deliver the data once it is made easily available has great promise. For instance here is EPA data on power plant emissions from GeoCommons:

From the map above you can see which power plants are producing the most poisonous CO2 emissions (click the down carrot on the layers box for the filter) or zoom into your specific neighborhood to see the plant and the type of environment around it. (Still refining the embed capability, but an example of how data can be virally spread).

The report goes on to recommend that the federal government should:

“Establishing pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.“

This strikes again at the heart of the GeoWeb - enabling collaboration of experts and citizens across the country. Several projects and companies have pioneered dynamic collaboration around maps. Below is a Google MyMap with feedback around the GeoCommons power plant data in Florida”

View Larger Map

The blue push pins are the user generated feedback linking to expert opinion and photos from the field. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible with collaboration around maps. These approaches can also be leveraged inside of government agencies, which is another plank in the Obama technology platform:

“Employing technologies, including blogs, wikis and social networking tools, to modernize internal, cross-agency, and public communication and information sharing to improve government decision making.”

We’ve seen a lot of this type of work going on in the intelligence community with Intelink, Intellipedia, and A-Space. There is also data fusion and sharing concepts, like the EPA’s Central Data Exchange. I’d love to hear other projects that fit in with the three planks, and more importantly existing or planned GeoWeb technologies that could help enable the new vision. I’ve really only highlighted two and I know there are tons more out there.

Popularity: 19% [?]

On one of many flights this week I was asked the question, “what would you do with the $700 billion of bailout money?” Not an easy question to answer and there has been lots of arm chair quarterbacking on the topic. I’m hardly an expert on financial policy, but in short this was my layover induced answer.

There seem to be two fundamental problems, of many, worsening our current economic quagmire. 1) The housing bubble pushed home prices to levels most working Americans could not afford and to keep the bubble going the financial community became very creative with mortgages and how the risk associated with them was calculated. The end result was lots of people in houses they could not really afford and very little transparency in the risk this created in the financial markets. There is a lot more to the story but for the sake of brevity we’ll leave it at that. 2) Credit liquidity in the current market has almost ossified causing our collective economic gears to come to a rattling halt. Wall Street freaks…the media freaks…the consumer freaks (no spending)…sales of goods plummet…Wall Street freaks again…media fuels more freaking…rinse and repeat.

To break the cycle it would seem logical that liquidity needs to be injected into the market. A lot of pundits have looked at this being solved by the government buying up the bad assets, giving capital to the banks in return for equity stakes, and several other derivative plans. While all these ideas have their merits and risks the idea I exposed on the plane was slightly different. Back to the core issues - I saw the biggest failing being lack of market transparency and a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand in the housing market. So how could we restore transparency to the market while getting people in homes they can actually afford thus freeing capital for consumer spending and financial investment.

My answer was a foreclosure clearing house. This may be Polly Anna and not feasible, but it made for a fun intellectual exercise. There has been lots of talk around providing bail outs to people whose homes are foreclosing, but even this will be short term and will not solve the fundamental problem that they are in a home they cannot afford. The only real solution is to put these individuals and families into homes they can afford. The easy credit and risk shell game that banks ran has created a basic mismatch of people buying supply with demand they did not really have.

The clearing house is a simple idea of providing a transparent market place where people can trade down to houses they can afford and have new loans guaranteed to do so. The loans could be guaranteed by the government but competed for by the banks. Banks that already have the mortgages on existing properties could have the choice of refinancing the house so the owner could afford the payments (that would be their own risk calculation) or entering the home into the clearing house. Also the home owner could have the choice to enter their home into the clearing house if they would like to trade down voluntarily.

The clearing house itself could run like many of the existing home real estate market places matching buyers and sellers (Zillow, Trullia. RedFin etc.). In fact the government could probably contract with one of the sites to run the technology side of the clearing house at a reasonable cost. Once a person’s home was identified for purchase they would then be free to look for a new home in the clearinghouse they could afford. The government backing would allow loans to be made so the individual, now free of the foreclosed home, could buy a new home they could afford. Banks would still compete to provide the best rate and terms to new owner, but the risk would all be transparent to the government since they would be providing financial backing and to the owners so they were not mislead into buying more house than they could afford (again).

In theory this should introduce liquidity back into the market and with a little time put liquidity back into the consumer market since the majority of a person’s paycheck would no longer be going to a mortgage. The market would be transparent again but not run or partially owned by the government. I would argue that it was not capitalism or the market economy that broke during this financial crisis, but a loss of transparency and a resulting hiding of risk. In fixing the crisis the government’s role should be ensuring transparency in the market place so that it can function effectively. My idea is most likely off the deep end, but I do hope government action is centered around restoring transparency and restoring liquidity to the market. If you were Sec. Paulson for a day what would you do with $700 billion? There are no shortage of smart people around the globe. Can we crowdsource an answer?

Popularity: 18% [?]

Our own Andrew Turner and Mikel Maron presented at Web 2.0 Expo today on trends and technology in Where 2.0.

Cutting Edge Where 2.0 Trends

To kick things off Brady Forrest of O’Reilly and Andrew just published a report on the GeoWeb space, it’s available now.

For those not familiar with the Geo-geek world they started off defining the Geoweb as an interlinked set of people and places around the world that is finally web aligned. These people and places are linked together through open standards that can be searched and indexed online. This gives us a huge trove of information and data from numerous sources.

A new driver of geodata is the trend towards mass adoption of location aware mobile devices. Users are bringing mobile devices into social environments, business, and even global settings. Socialight provides users collaboration capabilities leveraging online and mobile technologies to provide reviews and information on top restaurants and other locations. Large established companies such as TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ are actively expanding into mobile as well. Users can also gather data on their own, with massive success of OpenStreetMap being one prominent example.

The majority web 2.0 services are starting to add geography. Wikipedia, Flickr, even YouTube. This information can now be mined. Check out geocodr which create geotags based on Flickr photos.

One issue that’s coming up with all this open data is metadata and providing source authentication. Can the data be trusted? The ability to crowdsource information for a specific crowd or business is exciting, but having authoritatively knowing the source of where the information is coming from is even more important. Privacy is another pressing issue with open data. Flickr is offering geo-privacy to their photo uploads - this introduces the idea of “casual privacy”. Trusted locations also have a strong impact on how data is perceived by users.

Omnifocus has an iPhone tool that adds geolocation to your “to-do” list. It automatically geo-locates you, so you can discover the closest option to complete the next task on your list. So, if you’re out at CVS and need to go pick up something at a grocery store, Omnifocus can tell you where the closest store is to check that task off your list.

Mapvertising is another interesting concept. Coupons and other location based advertising have to be able to understand what users are searching for in context. For example, searching for a “romantic restaurant” should NOT result in an advertisement for Hooters.

FAIL:

Andrew also discussed advances in traditional GIS. ESRI is one big GIS solution provider that is opening their data via KML, javascript and flash.

Many new users are looking to do more complex analysis than just mapping push pins and would like to map more sophisticated open source and private data. For example, with Maker! you can take a look at how average rent in Manhattan can be thematically mapped to discover price trends.

Burning Man 2008 GeoHacks Technology (The future)

At this point Andrew passed the presentation over the Mikel to provide more of a geo-hacking perspective perspective on the GeoWeb. He got things into gear by discussing what he learned in the Black rock Desert of Nevada. Burning Man is a blank canvas on which to dream and create anything. It’s a single week long social experiment and a petri dish of urban development. It’s almost a laboratory that we can use to begin to examine all the geodata and tools we have. We can look at urban development, how social groups form in cities, etc.

Burning Man Earth had a lot of “geogeekery”. Over 100 GB of data were collected over the week.

Why is this important for Web 2.0 Expo? This is a prime example of Web 2.0 and Where 2.0 and what these technologies can enable. Open platforms, open standards, open data, and collaboration that is easy and cheap.

Amateur Remote Sensing

• pictearth.com
• diydrones.ning.com
• openaerialmap.org

We took remote sensing data every day. You don’t need expensive gear or a satellite. Small planes are used to get imagery with under $500. A plane is used with continuous shots and a camera hanging out the window with a clamp. The pilot has to manage the camera out the window, but there were no problems finding volunteers. “There are 3 F’s that no pilot will refuse….Food, Fuel, and something else…” Not only did we get aerial pics from planes, but also from kites.

Some great shots were taken as burning man convened. You can see how people created their spaces based on where the ones before them placed their tents.

We then processed the photo using ERMapper, ESRI, Photoshop, and some blood, sweat and tears.

The GeoDjango platform was used to collect even more visual data. If you have geographic items in your models, it can map to nicer views. A camp layout was placed in CAD for even more visualization, which we received in a PDF. To georectify, we used ESRI. We also had to use WMS and tiling (TileCache). These OpenLayers provided vectors from the PDF.

We then wanted to extend this to a social networking platform and get media artifacts from the information. We used “pinax” for networking. This data can be used for future city layout and camp planning tools.

Flickr took these tiles so people could geotag their photos from Burning Man based on the location of their maps.

Some of the other technologies that were used during burning man was Garmin radio for friend location, GPS tracking of vehicles, digipeater (which rebroadcasts to the Internet down the line for free).

Parting words:

“The Internet brings us together, but what if the single link holding us in place breaks?
What if what we learn in the harsh environment of the playa could be reapplied to those in crisis, instead of artistic indulgence?”

Popularity: 23% [?]