Nature Magazine: Google Earth Starts a Revolution

As you can see from my previous entries, my latest
timekiller is Google Earth. When I was
little, I used to look up places in a dusty oversized Atlas. Now I just use
Google Maps or Google Earth. This week Nature Magazine’s
Declan Butler (subscription required) describes how actual scientists are using
Google Earth to plot their datasets.  I
didn’t know scientists were using it, but I did know that some pilots had used
it to plot the routes of a couple of downed aircraft recently. Using FlightAware, you can
convert text tracks into Google-Earth-compatible XML files
(Courtesy Tom Armour) and see where the airplane was going.

While GE doesn’t have the analytic functions of ESRI’s ArcGIS, which
GIS people use to do all kinds of things, like improving farming production and
predicting wildfire paths, GE brings some level of GIS to everyone in a cheap,
easy-to-use manner. ESRI is releasing a major upgrade to ArcGIS this year and
is releasing its own free visualization tool, ArcGIS Explorer.  GE is making waves in the GIS world now and
will change things in the political world soon. Declan sums up the power of easy GIS: 

One of the traditional roles of GIS has been
to provide data to support decision-making. And environmental groups that have
discovered GIS are starting to use it to change the balance of power in public
debates. As more citizens become concerned about their local environment,
easy-to-use virtual globes will facilitate the communication of spatial
information between stakeholders and government agencies.

Al Gore backed a Digital Earth plan back in 1998, but the
project was killed in 2001. Seeing how the “Information Superhighway” changed
the Internet from a sleepy Cold-War government project into a high-capacity
commerce engine probably gave him an idea of what could happen with ubiquitous
GIS. 

When you can see everything, there’s no place left to hide.

Random footnote: When you register
for Google Earth Plus for $20, Google takes you to
registration.keyhole.com. Keyhole was the NRO's codeword for the
KH-series of spy satellites, one of the first significant uses of Bell
Lab's CCD devices,
which just won an award. Nobody mentioned that CCDs are another benefit
of  super-secret Cold War technology. Further reading: Spying With Maps.