Eyes on Darfur

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Amnesty Int'l has set up an interesting site - satellite images documenting all the destruction that's been wreaked on these folks. However you cut it, it's horrible and tragic, and it's remarkable the ways it gets continuously brought up and then glossed over.

Eyes on Darfur

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they've got to do a better job with the symbology - there's no way to turn off the red dots showing destroyed structures, and the dots cover the entire structure, so who can really say what happened? and it's flash-based, you can't pan or zoom, can't pick coordinates etc etc. i dunno. it's a start, but the Google Earth platform is built for this kind of thing, and while the imagery might not be as current, at least it's 'better' on the whole.

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taken from a blog (wow, i agree with absolutely everything he says)

In practice, this means that a Flash application (why-oh-why break the browser's back button and lock the satellite imagery into a proprietary format?) makes satellite imagery available to visitors that is just weeks or months old, and often also photos from before attacks.

Every initiative on Darfur is a worthy initiative. I would love, however, for this weeks-old data from Darfur to be made available in an open, georeferenced formats, in time series and on a much wider scale, so that GIS volunteers really can monitor villages for change. I'd gladly "adopt" one of the 1,600 villages and monitor it, given the data. I also think Flash is not the best visualization tool for geospatial data — there is not the natural flexibility with layers and such that lets this content be truly compelling and immersive:

The dots show destroyed structures, but cover those said structures, and you can't take them off. So I hope this new data also makes it into Google Earth.

Here's a better representation in a much better platform, but not so much back-story or meta-data.

Click here for a page that links to a Google Earth KMZ file.