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Google recently announced a joint effort with the U.S. Holocaust Museum to add layers to Google Earth showing high resolution imagery of the Darfur as well as images, stories and more collected by aide groups working the region.
The project, which was designed to raise awareness of the genocide in Sudan, by tying eyewitness accounts, photographs and videos together with precision mapping tools, also highlights the efforts of ordinary users who are constantly expanding and customizing Google Earth in ways that even Google hadn't previously considered.
The Darfur multimedia project is the brainchild of Michael Graham, now head of the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative.
"When Google Earth came out in June 2005 we had an 'aha!' moment at the Museum," Graham recalls. " we siezed upon the concept of Google Earth as a way to bring together multiple layers of information."
But despite the initial enthusiasm at the Holocaust Museum, in the beginning the bulk of the work involved on the Darfur project was carried out by a small group of volunteers, helmed by Graham.
"An independent volunteer group was formed in December of 2005 and we immediately set out to create a proof of concept," says Graham.
The group, known as [BrightEarth][1], set out to collect and annotate disparate data from sources like the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, as well as photographers and journalists working in the region.
While most of the data in the Darfur project was previously available, it was spread out in a variety of formats stored around the web. One the BrightEarth's early goals was to bring it together in one place.
"Google Earth allows you take data from lots of different sources and mix them together easily, anybody can make these files," says Declan Butler, a senior writer at Nature and one of the early volunteers in the BrightEarth Project.
"Google Earth is really like a browser and adding layers is like making a webpage," says Butler.
Google Earth has been downloaded over 200 million times and following similar trends in online communities, a growing number of those users are turning from consumers of data, to producers.
Butler has previously created maps to trace the Avian Bird flu epidemic and was also involved in relief efforts after the earthquake in Pakistan.
"Satellite imagery and other remote sensing material has been used in relief efforts for a while now," says Paul Currion akjflkajdfs. "However we haven't yet realised the full potential that this technology has, particularly in terms of deeper analysis of the situation on the ground."
One potential use that goes beyond Google Earth's simple beginnings is collecting imagery for use as a legal tool. "Many attrocities take place in anonymity, and we are slowly whittling away at that," says Lars Bromley of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"I would love to see a repeat of Bashir's interview a couple months ago with NBC nightly news, but this time have the host zoom down to the burned out remains of hundreds of villages and ask him to explain how these remains of villages the audience is seeing with their own eyes have actually not been attacked and destroyed." - Michael Graham.
The initial goals for the project were to develop a way for humanitarian groups to use google Earth. "Why should organizations like the UN or aid organizations have to spend days creating and disseminating individual maps whenever they want to contribute to the 'situational picture'?"
The Darfur Project is a sort of pilot venture designed not just to educated and adsklfj Google Earth's estimated 200 million users about Darfur, but also show humanitarian organizations how Google Earth can help collect and make data viewable and searchable from a single folder within Google Earth -- making access as simple as possible.
Since its launch two years ago Google Earth has grown from a fun toy for mapping nerds to useful tool for scientists and a large cadre of amatuer enthusiasts who are taking the software byond the realm of simple mapping.
Google Earth has potential far beyond just the satellite images it contains. Through the use of layers which allow additional data to visually overlay the images, it's possible to bring together images, video, text and more -- a potentially huge boon to humanitariam organizations.
The results are the Darfur Project overlays which add features to the Google-provided high resolution images of Darfur.
Icons showing red flames lead to destroyed villages while yellow flames highlight partitally raized areas. Other icons include links to videos, photographs and eyewitness accounts of each damaged and destroyed village.
"what it's really about is the people of Darfur, and how we might relieve their suffering."
"Satellite imagery and other remote sensing material has been used in relief efforts for a while now. I started working in this area in 1999; we've used remote sensing imagery in every deployment of the UN Humanitarian Information Centres, and a number of UN agencies and NGOs have included it in their GIS development. However we haven't yet realised the full potential that this technology has, particularly in terms of deeper analysis of the situation on the ground." paul currion
As envisioned, the platform/partnership would have two broad goals:
public education about global human rights issues including genocide,
conflict, poverty, health, etc; and secondly, information-sharing for the
professional foreign policy community, which would involve using GE as
a focal point to help humanitarian actors share both their open and
more sensitive geospatial information quickly and easily with all layers
viewable and searchable from a single folder within GE, making access
as simple as possible. Public layers would be hosted by Google itself
and instantly accessible to anyone who downloads the program, and
sensitive ones available through a secure server.
[1]: http://www.brightearthproject.org/ "The Bright Earth Project"
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Earlier this year last year teams of volunteers around the internet used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to search for Microsoft programmer Jim Gray who's yacht went missing off the coast of California. Volunteers continued to search through satellite images even after the Coast Guard called off its official search.
"That is a hard thing to do with traditional web-based awareness approaches." Michael Graham.
Much of the impact of Al Gore's Oscar winning file <cite>And Inconvenient Truth</cite> makes use of Google Earth-style maps and graphics to humanize abstract data.
Butler has previously created google Earth layers to maps outbreaks Avian flu and was also involved in relief efforts after the earthquake in Pakistan.
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