Hi Matt First off, I'm a digest man. so apologies for the ATM. I wasn't thinking of poo-pooing Google in this case, as I figured they'd buy whatever is available (re: DG imagery). I was thinking more of those who provide imagery. In my data I recognize the economic value of data (sorry, I will be aggregating Moscow subway data *long* before I do Flint bus routes). That said, Goolge aims to be an everywhere/all the time provider of media to enable retrieval, so it struck me as odd that high-er res imagery isn't available (or maybe--doesn't exist??) for Flint. There's higher res stuff for other non-urban areas of MI.
ian Message: 5 Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:42:21 -0700 From: "Matthew Perry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Geowanking] low res for flint, mi? To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Ian, On 8/16/06, Ian White|Urban Mapping <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Here's a good case of geo-cultural neglect--one of my guys was looking at > GE's imagery of Flint MI and the resolution is quite poor--no question some > remote areas of China have higher resolution. Thoughts? Theories? > Conspiracies? Soooo.. because Google neglegted to obtain high-res photography for Flint MI, this indicates some sort of systematic cultural neglect or bias? I hope this is a joke (good one!) but if it's not... Open up Google earth. Zoom in to the whole USA.. see that nice contiguous base image with tons of patchy sploches on top. The base image is the low-res default and the splotches are the areas covered by high-res imagery. Observe how the vast majority of the globe is lacking high-res data. Sure the big cities and populated areas are more likely to have high-res imagery. The data's expensive and google doesn't want to waste their money buying millions of dollars of high-res tundra, forest and desert shots when most users just want to zoom in on their back yard. "Ahah" you say, "Why isn't Flint, a town of 125,000 poeple, not represented? It must be a geo-cultural bias!". Take a look at Connecticut.... Bridgeport, Waterbury, Danbury, Hartford (the capital!) ... none of these sizable cities have high res photography. While the neighboring state to the north, Massachusetts, is 100% blanketed by high-res color images. By this logic, Google *clearly* has a cultural bias against the good people of Connecticut and in favor of their northerly neighbors. Yeah, either that or Google simply had easier access to imagery in massachusetts due to their statewide imagery program (http://www.mass.gov/mgis/new-colororthos.htm). Still all kidding aside, I would like to know how Google decides what imagery to obtain and what imagery to leave out. Was there some sort of return-on-investment analysis that decided it was more important to provide certain cities with imagery versus others? Who knows, maybe they really do have something against people from Flint and/or Connecticut ;-) -- Matt Perry [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.perrygeo.net ****************************************** _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
