Virtual Earth For Public Sector

I am surprised that the Microsoft Environmental team still talks to me. They launched a really cool Microsoft Environment site back in May and I have been remiss in sharing that with my Virtual Earth for Public Sector readers. The site shares how Microsoft and its partners use innovative technologies and responsible business practices to address environmental challenges worldwide. And if I am writing about it, you know that Virtual Earth is well-represented.

The site can be found here. Look for the following Virtual Earth related information:

• Sungevity Uses Virtual Earth to Quickly, Remotely Assess Customer Sites. Solar power has enormous potential. But so far it’s not living up to that potential. In the U.S., for instance, solar provides less than 1 percent of the nation’s energy needs. That’s in part because solar energy installations for homes are typically custom-made, expensive units. What’s needed is a new way to market and install solar energy. "Solar is going to be huge, but to get there it needs to smarten up its game," says Danny Kennedy, CEO of Sungevity, a solar-energy startup that is looking to take that step. Based in Berkeley, Calif., and founded in 2008, Sungevity is aiming to become, as Fortune magazine called it, "the Dell of solar energy," using technology to create new efficiencies and better service customers. A key part of that is the way Sungevity takes advantage of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth global mapping platform to lower the cost of solar energy installation, help homeowners easily see the value of solar energy, and make its usage more widespread. Read full article here.
• Virtual Earth Brings Limited Water Resource into Focus. In 2007, the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) in Victoria, Australia engaged Geomatic Technologies, a Microsoft partner and specialist in location-based business intelligence, to develop a Groundwater Management Unit Inventory. The new Microsoft Virtual Earth-based groundwater management tool is designed to overcome a simple but daunting problem: mapping out areas of intensive groundwater use, determining management actions for stressed aquifers, and making that information quickly and widely available. Read full article.

• Microsoft Technology Powers Environmental Crisis–Response Tool. When a crisis strikes, timing is an organization's greatest resource, and often means the difference between containment and escalation. Enter JEPRS, the Joint Emergency Planning & Response System.JEPRS is a crisis and incident management solution developed by Infusion Development, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. JEPRS connects all critical stakeholders, including Disaster Managers, Operations Managers, and Field First Responders with common operating information about a crisis that they can access anytime, anywhere. The 3-D mapping capabilities of Microsoft Virtual Earth combined with the data power of Microsoft SharePoint make JEPRS an extremely effective tool for managing environmental events. Read full article here.

• Environmental Protection Agency Improves Data Visualization with Mapping Technology. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for ensuring public access to environmental information associated with facilities and sites across the country. For years, EPA provided a Web-based data-access tool that combined facility-level environmental information with online maps. However, the technology in use provided only static maps with limited interactive functionality. EPA recently replaced its outdated technology with Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ technology, which offers high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery, dramatically faster response times, and easy integration with environmental data sets. As a result, EPA expects a more consumer-friendly data resource, an innovative foundation for future growth, and a more efficient IT platform. Full case study here.
• European Environment Agency and Microsoft Eye on Earth Observatory Bring European Beach Quality Into Sharp Focus. Microsoft Corp and the European Environment Agency (EEA) today announced the launch of the pioneering Eye on Earth online environmental observatory with the first of its resources, Water Watch. Eye on Earth is part of a five-year collaboration between the EEA and Microsoft that will ultimately gather together critical information, including European water soil, air and ozone indicators, into one place. From today, Eye on Earth allows governments, policymakers and individuals to compare the cleanliness of bathing water from sites across 27 European countries, giving people the power to choose where they swim and to influence their environment. Read full story.

While you're out on the site, be sure to check out the other articles, case studies and information on how Microsoft is actively striving to be a good steward for the environment by adhering to sound environmental principles and business practices.

I am often asked by public sector customers about the ability to consume Virtual Earth imagery outside of Virtual Earth. This was recently made possible within ESRI ArcGIS tools and is now made possible completely offline through two new resellers, i-cubed and MapMart.com. The following are points from an announcement that was distributed late last week.

Why is the Virtual Earth team licensing imagery for offline use?

Our high-resolution UltraCam ortho-imagery is prized for GIS, urban planning, engineering and other applications that are often performed in offline desktop environments, yet our existing Virtual Earth offerings prohibit any offline use of our data. By offering our data in an offline mode, we complement our online Virtual Earth web service offerings, increase Microsoft and Virtual Earth brand awareness worldwide, and generate revenues. These groundbreaking deals are the first milestone in Virtual Earth's monetization of MS-owned geospatial products for offline use.   

How is this Being Done?

Our resellers will host the data and provide sales, marketing and fulfillment services. We selected i-cubed, LLC and Mapmart.com as our first resellers. Both are top-notch companies with proven leadership in the geodata markets, and we’re excited to have them lead our channel sales.

· i-cubed, LLC is a top-tier provider of imagery, data distribution software, and image processing services to governments and commercial entities worldwide. As the exclusive data provider for ESRI’s ArcGIS users who want to use data locally, they will offer VE’s UltraCam imagery through the ESRI platform (Beta) and through a standalone web site they’ll launch in the coming weeks.

· MapMart.com is a high volume geodata provider with strong experience in the prosumer market. They just launched VE’s UltraCam data on their website last week.  Their announcement can be read here: http://www.amerisurv.com/content/view/5334/2/ 

What’s Available and Who Needs it?

Currently we have over 200 cities of mosaicked color airborne imagery collected at 6” nominal resolution, averaging less than two years old. The 6” spatial resolution rivals any large-scale commercial source today, and our newest processing techniques produce orthomosaics with almost no building lean in the image--invaluable for unobstructed views into areas with tall buildings, etc.  As Microsoft acquires and processes imagery for more cities around the world, the archive is expected to grow substantially. This imagery is invaluable for urban planners, GIS analysts, and the prosumer geospatial market. We expect municipalities, engineering firms, emergency response agencies, and utilities to be core customers. 

Here's a technology I really haven't discussed much on the Virtual Earth for Public Sector blog (shame on me).

Until now, Photosynth was a  Live Labs research project that you could just get a glimpse of through a technology preview web site. But the Photosynth team was recently moved into the Virtual Earth team and has released an official Photosynth site that allows you to not only view Photosynth collections hosted there, but to add your own. Time to bring it to the attention of Public Sector customers, given its ability to allow for images collected in the field to be assembled in a manner to then allow the scene to be explored and navigated in a 3D like manner.

So what is Photosynth? Borrowing from the About Photosynth discussion on the site: It is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs--the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.  Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.

The new Photosynth site hosts some great collections. You can check out some photos of Constitution Hall on the site here. Press the down arrow a few times to see the document in the context of the whole hall.  This  one of a Boulder tea house illustrates how a complex room can be quickly recorded and easily reviewed and shared, zoom back with the scroll wheel to see the whole room.  This Boulder aerial synth is wild ... it shows a great view of Boulder, about 400 of them actually, all automagically assembled into a 3D web accessible collection in a matter of a few hours.  Next best thing to buying an UltraCam, Microsoft's large format digital aerial camera, holding it out the window of your plane, and building your own Virtual Town!

[NOTE: Viewing the Photosynth site requires installation of the

The best part: Photosynth will be linking up more with Virtual Earth. For now Photosynth lets you geotag your Synth collections with Virtual Earth, just look for the little button next to the Synth’s viewer window.

Chris Pendleton provides an example of this, code and all, in his Virtual Earth Developer's blog. Meanwhile, you can see an instructional video on collecting imagery and creating the Synth collection.

Mark your calendars for August 26th when Microsoft Virtual Earth partner IDV Solutions is conducting a webinar hosted by Directions Media.

The webinar focuses on how to deliver the experience that typical end users in an organization expect when interacting with enterprise applications, and how the GIS community can use IDV Solutions' Visual Fusion and Microsoft's SharePoint to meet those expectations when scaling GIS efforts out to a non-specialist audience. Learn how to maximize the GIS data analysis and data investments you have in ESRI, MapInfo, Intergraph, etc., by using IVD's Visual Fusion and SharePoint, and Virtual Earth as a platform for integrating, sharing and collaborating around your GIS and enterprise data.

Register for the event.

Quick entry from the show ESRI International User conference here in San Diego. There is a lot of excitement around the newly announced access of Virtual Earth imagery as premium services for the ArcGIS workflow. Including a diagram below to summarize.

The show is going extremely well and Virtual Earth is getting a lot of love both from commercial and public sector organizations. And of course the weather in San Diego is unbelievable. But don't take my word for it ... check out this screenshot from an application from Weatherbug, one of the other vendors I discovered here at the show. The app plots weather stations on Virtual Earth maps that provide users with weather information at those locations as well as web cam shots (where available).

Quite exciting to be at an event and stumble on Virtual Earth lovers!