Development Seed

Today at the Camp Roberts exercise we integrated 50 centimeter data form the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) into our mapping stack, which is acting as a "incident" visualization dashboard. In short, Robert and Tom have built a lightweight Drupal aggregation hub sucking in Pakistan and Afghanistan incident reports coming in from both Relief Web and IRIN. The incidents are being geo-tagged thanks to Alex's (who is back in the DC office) work on a lightweight geo-coding tool that we have been investing in with the support of the Knight Foundation.

In addition to the NGA data, you can see we have a custom road overlay that AJ designed in QGIS using OSM data. This is the road from Kabul in the West thought Jalalabad across the Durand Line (in red) to Peshawar and then on to Islamabad. Here you can see a new post from IRIN on civilians caught in the crossfire being treated in Peshawar.

This is a big deal. To get a sense of what the 50 cm data looks like, here is a picture of the 50 cm tiles next to regular Google tiles that are 15 meters:

Here is a close up of Kabul:

With max zoom-in:

The NGA data was made accessible thanks to the team from Google, who came with serious hardware running Google Earth Enterprise and Google Earth Fusion. This hardware, which can handle distributed data processing across multiple CPUs (and even multiple machines) handled all the data process, transforming the the 500 Gigabytes of data in geotiff format into a tile set. We now have the Google Fusion Server running locally on base. Since our mapping stack can point to multiple tile servers we are able to have base layers from both the NGA Google Fusion Server and our custom base layers coming from Amazon's CloudFront CDN. Here is a look at the Google team at work:

Here you can see Sean behind the computer turning out the tiles

It will be interesting to see what happens with this NGA data. We might host this in Amazon's cloud for some of our clients operating in the region.