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Recent infrared aerial photographs of the Nashville area flooding were taken by TN Department of Transportation.  Generally TDOT charges for their imagery, however, according to a super secretive resource from TDOT’s GIS department, these photos may soon become available to state and local governments for free.  How did we get this super secret information from our super secretive source?  I’ll let you in on the secret… We emailed them…

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TDOT flew Monday, May 3rd – Saturday, May 7th over major flood areas.  As you can imagine, some of the later photos taken Friday and Saturday did not capture the full flood epidemic.   The good news is that we have the flight patterns.  Hopefully some of you will be able to incorporate these photos into your GIS soon. 

 No wonder it took all week, they flew all over the place!  Oh, and thanks for the screenshots Google Earth.

Since 2004, over 2000 people from 25 different cities around the world have participated in Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping experiment.  Using a GPS and GRS (Galvanic Skin Response) device (invented by Nold), Nold maps variant emotional responses of people as they travel through a city.  The bio-sensor (GRS device), which is based on a lie-dectector, measures changes in the sweat level of the wearers’ fingers and the GPS captures response geographically.  The assumption is that these changes are an indication of emotional intensity that is tracked by the GPS device and later mapped in Google Earth.  I wonder what the map would look like at a Dashboard Confessional concert…

The London based artist, describes the unique mapping experience as a “total inversion of the lie-detector, which supposes that the body tells the truth, while we lie with our spoken words.”  He further explains, “With Bio Mapping, people’s interpretation and public discussion of their own data becomes the true and meaningful record of their experience. Talking about their body data in this way, they are generating a new type of knowledge combining ‘objective’ biometric data and geographical position, with the ‘subjective story’ as a new kind of psychogeography.” 

Although I joke about connecting emotions with geography,  Nold’s device opens up a world of new marketing and psycho/social research capabilities.   It also presses on the ever increasing questions of emergence of technology and the human emotion.  Read also has an online book containing a collection of essays called Emotional Cartography.

Step 2 – - Using a GPS find the geocaches near the location of your geocaching event.   You could use them in your event and/or make sure that you’re caches aren’t close to those already hidden.

• Register for a free basic membership at www.geoaching.com?
• Click “Hide & Seek a Cache.”
• Enter the postal code of your event
• choose any geocache from the list and click on its name.
• Enter the coordinates of the geocache into your GPS device.
• Use your GPS device to assist you in finding the hidden geocache.

Step 3 —  While searching for the caches, also capture your geocaching event locations.  We suggest using a more accurate GPS device, like the Trimble Juno SC.

Step 4– Tranfer your points to a KML file and upload them to Google Maps and/or Google Earth.  We did this to check over our points and measure the approximate miles traveled between caches.  We don’t deem this step necessary, but it is still a lot of fun.

Transfer File into Google Maps

• Upload data from your GPS device into Pathfinder Office and save it as a KML file.
• Open Google Maps and log into your Google account.
• Go to “My Maps”
• “Create New Map”
• Import the KML file, make any editing changes, and click “Done.”

Transfer File into Google Earth

• Upload data from your GPS device into Pathfinder Office and save it as  a KML file.
• Open Google Earth
• Click “File”
• Click “Open”
• Find your saved KML file
• Click “Open”

Oh, That's Where He Hid It!

Step 5 — Purchase inexpensive containers.  We suggest purchasing small plastic paint containers (microcaches) for the event from Wal-Mart.  You can keep the paint in the container or clean them out and put other things in them.

Step 6 — The day before the event, take your points and hide the caches.  If you don’t know who is going to be apart of the event, try to avoid placing caches in dangerous/hazardous areas that could be harmful to others.  Follow along with your GPS device as if you were in the cache.  (We found a few issues with our locations that could have been avoided by following our GPS device more precisely.)

Step 7 –Email the geoacaching locations  map you created to the geocachers signed up for the event (You can also email links to the google maps you created).  Make sure each point is attributed correctly with at least the latitude and longitude, cache name, and any other comments or hints you would like to give the geocachers.  Don’t forget to include a meeting location and time in your email!

Step 8 –Create questions about each cache that could only be answered if the cache was found by the geocachers.  Print off enough for everyone in the event and make sure you bring pens/pencils for those who need them.  Also print off the latitude and longitude list of all the attributes in case the geocachers did not previously store the points from the email you sent them prior to the event.

Step 9 — Go over the rules and hand out all of the information.  Consider taking away points for people not back within a set time.  For our last event, each correctly answered cache question was worth 4 points but for any geocachers out past two hours, 1 point was reduced for each minute late.

Step 10 –Enjoy the event and make sure everyone gets back safely.  Go back and pick up the caches you placed.  If you plan on leaving the caches, fill out the online form on the geocaching website under “Hide & Seek A Cache” (you must be logged in).

The Google Earth blog posted about how you can turn your google earth experience into this special halloween edition.  Download this kmz file and open it up in Google Earth. You’ll see the earth in a whole new way.

Many roads throughout the state share the same name, and some roads have the Highway number, not the common names. I randomly chose Main St and High St as an intersection to search for in ArcMap. 186 results for the two street names!

Enter Google Earth. Searching for an intersection in Google Earth provides excellent results and even offers up alternative answers if you know the city or town.

Once I’ve chosen the appropriate location (the second alternative offered by GE), right click on the pin location and check the properties to get the Latitude and Longitude.

In ArcMap I use the “Go to XY” tool to paste in the coordinates and I can zoom to the exact location! Make sure you choose “Degrees Minutes Seconds” to get Lat and Long instead of X and Y.

The green dot was added from the Go to XY toolbar. The streets weren’t even part of my 186 selected features! Because I searched for “MAIN ST” and the NJDOT geodatabase has it as “MAIN STREET”. And High St was tagged as Essex County 638.

Info from the Google Earth Blog.

Get the plugin here.

So the big news for the ESRI user base is how Google and ESRI are going to work together at least in the technical sharing of data sense. From a keynote address, the following highlights show a glimpse of how this will play out (from APB).

ArcGIS Server 9.3 (available in about 4 weeks, per Dangermond) will make its metadata service “scrapable” into KML and thus findable via Google’s geographic search (once known as KML search). Further, ArcGIS Server will be able to publish not only that data as streaming KML (and GeoRSS) but also related services. Dangermond showed finding data from a Portland, Oregon service, visualizing it and then performing analysis, all from Google Earth. Said another way, all data and services served by ArcGIS Server could potentially be findable and usable in any Google mashup. Further, the resultant KML can be used in app that supports the OGC standard.

ESRI has enhanced the API for ArcGIS Server 9.3 (JavaScript/Flash) to make it more conducive to plugging into other Web mapping properties in mashups.

Google is making its geographic search available in its various APIs. To date it was only available via Google Maps and Google Earth applications. Now any Google developers will be able to do “local search” on explicitly tagged data (KML built via MyMaps or 3rd party apps like Platial and Flckr or your GIS!).

According to APB:

These announcements have some important implications for the geospatial marketplace:
1) the use of and demand for ArcGIS Server should rise
2) any geo data or services provider who wants to play on the Web needs to look at how it will provide findability and usability of its data and services in this way
3) geodata-finding portals may, in time, become extinct – if the KML vision for search and distribution becomes a de facto one as well
4) the technology may be available, but the institutional barriers to data sharing may still be blocking the path (as noted in a question at the end of the session)

It seems that costs should come down for budget conscious agencies looking to maximize the ingestion of free data available throughout the Where 2.0 map world, while at the same time managing only those internal datasets that are either required by law, security-focused, or otherwise need to be handled locally. This leaves a plethora of free data that someone else can manage and make available. This news means combining these disparate datasets is now easier and more seamless than ever. “Why can’t we all just get along” just flew out the window.