Sunday, May 24, 2009

Everything is spatially important part 1: Honoring the Fallen Ones

In order to tribute the importance of the location, I am starting the a section on the topics that are spatially important. This section focuses on certain topics that are spatially important.
This morning, Sean Askay, an engineer at Google, released a kmz file (a layer specially designed for Google) that has a great visualization of the casualties during war. The layer was released to honor the fallen ones on the eve of memorial day. The layer contains information on more than 5700 service members from north America who last their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. This interactive layer in Google has a great visualization on the detailed information of those people with their origin locations and estimated death locations. With the option of 3D visualization, the Google Earth offers very detailed information of those locations. The file can be downloaded here. . In order to view the file, you have to have Google Earth Version 5.0 installed which can be found here. The visualization in Google Earth looks like this:

visualizing the "Fallen Ones"

The map (layer) contains the information with the legend containing people from and estimated location of their death. Visualization of their places of origin looks like this:


And the visualization of their estimated death:


The data for the layer was collected from icasualties.org, Department of Defense and other honorary websites for military. The detail information on the data acquision can be found at the MaptheFalen blog and featured news story at cnet.com

It is unfortunate to lose human being in the war whatever the group they belong to. However, the spatial media like Google Earth, news and blogging media have made the information available to those people interested in being up-to-date with the worldly matter. Sean Askay, the author of the MaptheFallen blog has recently updated the site with some incidents of the errors in the layer he provided.

Since time immemorial, location is the key to visualizing information on/about war. Neo geography and technology have made it just better!

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