Digitizing the Planet: Announcing a new open global data portal

A conversation with Patrick Hogan, Project Lead, NASA World Wind; and Kevin Montgomery, CEO, Intelesense Technologies; hosted by Mark Anderson

World Wind

• World Wind is Google Earth, only you can do what you want with it: It’s open-source, and available to anyone.  Originally designed for education, its biggest user currently is the Department of Defense. 
• Patrick Hogan: Purpose of World Wind is “To build the technology that allowed Earth to be seen in its native context and … to allow innovation to occur by others. The government in its capacity should be facilitating innovation.”  
• Have opened World Wind up to developers in Europe to encourage innovation and effective use of data.
• “The excitement is just seeing the possibilities freed up of what people are able to do with their own data.”

Announcing the Open Beta release of Collaborate.org exclusively for FiRe members

• Climate change, pandemics and disasters are going to increase, but resources are decreasing. No one individual or agency or government can do it all. We need an infrastructure to support these efforts. 
• Collaborate.org is an online global community empowered with geospatial tools, using World Wind to aggregate, collaborate data irrespective of geographic boundaries.
• Collaboration tools allow us to video conference, share documents, etc.
• “What if we could empower that group of thoughtful, committed citizens to allow them to do their job better?” And, more importantly, what if we could empower them to find other groups like them?
• Includes: Environmental and imagery sensors, GIS data and databases, news and RSS feeds, social media, satellite imagery, aerial imagery integrated and accessible through laptops, tablets, etc
• Zoom in and out anywhere on the planet.
• Customizable. FiRe users can contribute data and information to this, bring it home, put it on your desktop, etc.
• “Go forth and do great things,” says Kevin Montgomery. “The only caveat is, what can you contribute?”

Kevin Montgomery announces the Open Beta of Collaborate.org at FiRe 2013.