San Diego Wild Fires
NASA support has been requested in for a state of emergency so we are all trying to help as we can. We have modified our GEOSS workflows to monitor the situation in the San Diego area. Fire threats are being detected based on MODIS data and EO-1 is being tasked twice a day to image the area.
RESTful workflows implemented using OpenWFERu are being used to process the imagery to deliver the data to the first responders. First thermal imagery processed onboard the satellite has been downlinked and is available on http://eo1.geobliki.com. Higher resolution data will be available as soon as possible.
As more than 500,000 people are being evacuated and many are loosing their homes, our prayers and thoughts are with you.
GEOSS Wild Fires Scenario on YouTube
Our latest video on our GEOSS use-case finally made it to YouTube.
With Many thanks to Ingo Simonis!
A WFS-Basic as a Geo-Atom Store 1
Here is the plan for a demo:
A Web Feature Server (WFS) in its basic incantation is really a store of geospatial collections that can be accessed using RESTful services.
Building Web Services the REST way has been a very hot topic in the Rails Community.
Rails 1.2 can quickly allow you to build such services and return xml or html on-demand. JSON or [Geo]-rss/atom could be returned as easily in a similar manner.
The idea here is to return a GeoAtom Feed that could follow a similar structure as GData with a namespace specific to that WFS and an additional extension for the geospatial component.
Discovering the meta-data should be feasible using a meta-data feed and probing a specific url.
This would give us many services to access the various collections and the meta-data. The whole package could be described using a service document as proposed in the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) that would describe all the available services. This document itself would be available at a specific url.
Searching the WFS would be done via OpenSearch-Geo which is another REST service returning atom or KML feeds.
The goal is to implement this for the upcoming ESTO/AIST Fire Management demo this summer and support the GEOSS Pilot effort this fall. This is also in line with our participation into the OWS-5 Agile Geography testbed.
A Few Links:
A Global Search Engine For Geospatial Data
Great article From Sandra Upson in Spectrum Magazine.
“Making such work as simple as a Web search is the central objective of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), an endeavor taking its first baby steps this summer….Scientists inch toward a standardized, universal system…”
It is all about interoperability and working together :)
Goddard Tech Trends Aug 2007
Great article in Goddard Tech Trends this month. “Using the Internet to cross-link and Task Earth-Observing Sensors”. This is a wonderful follow-up to our interoperability effort with OWS-5 and our GEOSS Pilot Program.