Google connects with Public Laboratory Map Archive

[Stewart Long]

We have some exciting news to share – Google Earth is now using 45 of the maps the Public Laboratory community produced! 

The Public Laboratory Archive includes many public domain-released maps - so that they can be redistributed without "friction". Such is the case with today's announcement -- Google is now publishing finished maps from our archive that have the public domain designation. We are excited that Google has connected with our open data archive, and hope that other organizations will choose to do the same. The Google Geo "Lat Long Blog" has a nice post on the new maps in Google. We hope to continue distributing our maps to Google several times a year.  This first wave of maps includes 45 total maps and 9 that are showing up in Google Maps as well as Google Earth.

Google Lat Long Blog:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/04/balloon-and-kite-imagery-in-google.html

KML feed. Download this feed and see the maps in Google Earth (they're already in there, this is just a list of places/times):

http://archive.publiclaboratory.org/google/PublicLaboratoryImagery_nl.kml

We’re preparing a news release now, which we'll hopefully send out later today, but in the meantime, it would be great if people could help spread the word about this exciting initiative. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks once again to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation -- whose generous Knight News Challenge grant helped make this possible.

Thanks, 

Stewart

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Stewart Long

director of geography and data

publiclaboratory.org

+1-760-888-5287

[Jeffrey Warren]

Congratulations everyone, this is a big moment for our community. 

I wanted to call out a couple maps which made it to the "primary layer" and are now actually visible in Google Maps, not just the historical time slider:

- the Gowanus Canal (!!!!): http://g.co/maps/ds8bs

- a natural gas well in Rifle Colorado: http://g.co/maps/8abnf

- WhereCamp 2011 at the Stanford campus: http://g.co/maps/khpzj

Jeff

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[Stewart Long]

- the Gowanus Canal (!!!!): http://g.co/maps/ds8bs 

 (people working on a community garden, a solar balloon launch is also visible in the center of the map)

- a natural gas well in Rifle Colorado: http://g.co/maps/8abnf

 (look for the horses and goats in the NW pasture)

and a few more to call out:
Jamison Square. Portland, Oregon (turn off 45 degree imagery to see the vertical map): http://g.co/maps/f2mxj 

Foothills Community Park . Boulder, Colorado (turn off 45 degree imagery to see the vertical map) : http://g.co/maps/hwybt 

-Stewart

[hagit keysar]

I toured some of the maps in google earth. Congratulations! this is really exciting!

We have two beautiful maps of places in Jerusalem, I'm a bit slow, but soon will upload...

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[Christiaan Adams]

Hi Public Laboratory and Grassroots Mapping communities, 

Christiaan Adams here from the Google Earth Outreach team.  We're very excited that we were able to publish some of the imagery from the Public Labs archive into Google Earth!  As you've probably seen by now in the blog post, we published about 45 images into Google Earth's historical imagery database.  To find the images in Google Earth download this kml file, and use it to fly to the image locations in space and time (it will turn on the historical imagery tool for you).  If it's your first time using historical imagery, check out this video tutorial and this user guide.  When you want to go back to seeing the default imagery layer again, you can turn off historical imagery using the button on the toolbar (or the "X" on the time slider control).  As some of you discovered, we picked out a few images that were especially high quality and well geo-referenced to add to the default database for the baselayer imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps.  Have fun finding them!  

A few of you will also notice that some of the images from the archive didn't show up in Earth, since they didn't make it through our processing correctly.  We'll try again later, and add them to the KML file if/when they go live.  You may find a few other images that did make it into Earth, but had incorrect geo-referencing so they are distorted and/or shifted away from where they should be.  These are not included in the KML either, but we'll add them if/when we get a chance to fix them.  Also, we only used Public Domain licensed data in the visual spectrum (plus one infrared scene that slipped in).  We might be able to use the Creative Commons Attribution data in the future, but it would take some more legal work to figure out the licensing.  

I'm sure many of you want to know if and when we will add more Public Laboratory imagery to Google Earth.  I personally hope that we can, but unfortunately I can't promise anything right now.  Processing these images into our databases is relatively labor intensive per unit area, since they are significantly smaller than the large satellite datasets we usually work with, and the geo-referencing quality is more variable.  If you all post a lot more interesting, high-quality data, and can show interesting use-cases for having it in Google Earth, it'll make it easier to justify the effort on our end... and of course, we'll keep you posted.  I'll look forward to reviewing the archive with the Public Labs folks in 6 months or so, to look at any new data that is available, and see what we can do.  

Feel free to send any questions, comments or feedback my way.  

Looking forward to working with you all in the future!

-Christiaan

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Christiaan Adams
Google Earth Outreach  http://earth.google.com/outreach
Google Crisis Response, Google.org   http://www.google.org

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[Liz Barry]

Hi Christiaan, 

Thank you for all your help with this!

Liz

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@lizbarry

[Shannon Dosemagen]

I've attached the news release for those of you that requested it. Please feel free to pass around to others that you think would be interested.

Shannon

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Shannon Dosemagen
Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science
504.239.4642
publiclaboratory.org

[Liz Barry]

Great coverage = lots of visitors to the site = some downtime this morning, sorry about that!

Below are a few links to the most traffic-generating blogs. Check out the stories and consider adding your informed voice to the comments sections where people are discussing the ramifications: 

Gizmodo coverage: http://gizmodo.com/5902926/balloon-and-kite-cameras-give-gorgeous-google-earth?tag=google (comment section might be worth one of us making a note about privacy and the legal and ethical requirements on aerial mappers related to private property?)

Clubic coverage: http://www.clubic.com/internet/univers-google/google-maps/actualite-487334-cartographie-google-earth-cerf-volants-ballons-helium.html does anyone on list speak French?

Engadget coverage: http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/17/google-earth-adds-balloon-and-kite-aerial-imagery/ (it would be good to respond to the more obnoxious comments others left about Google owning the data since that is not the case.)

Thanks all, truly an amazing community effort on this entire project!

Liz

[Christiaan Adams]

Liz, 

Thanks for the coverage reports.  Great to see it getting some traction.   It's always "interesting" to see which bits the reporters get right or not when they cover tech stuff.  :-\   The comments are unfortunately typical of what we often see from a vocal few, but since I suspect many more people read the article than the comments, I'm not too worried.  Still, it would be good if community members could respond to the uninformed comments about data ownership, collection, and privacy.  

Hope the website wasn't down too long... thanks for getting it back up!

Great to be working with you all!

-Christiaan

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Christiaan Adams
Google Earth Outreach  http://earth.google.com/outreach
Google Crisis Response, Google.org   http://www.google.org

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