The “virtual fence” sensor web project along the Mexican border has been stripped of $50Million of federal stimulus funds by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano due to cost overruns and missed deadlines. The fence has been installed and is undergoing testing in two areas along the Arizona border, but there are no plans to extend it. Instead the funds are being diverted to personal tech for border guards, including laptops, radios, thermal imaging devices and cameras.

Read more in this story from the New York Times.

The Earth Engine is an idea that spun out of work that Google.org was doing with the Google Earth Outreach Program in Brazil with indigenous people and non-profit organizations focused on conservation. The scientists were happy with Google Earth, but expressed the need for a system that could not only map, but also monitor, deforestation in the Amazon.

I spoke with Rebecca Moore, the Engineering manager of Earth Engine and Google Earth Outreach, about the impetus and objectives of the Earth Engine project.

Here’s Moore on the design:

“The idea will be to ultimately provide for public benefit an online repository that brings together all of the Earth’s observation data (satellite imagery, terrain datasets, vector data such as roads, borders, population centers, soil information, climate information) into one large georeferenced data store. And then to provide, through an easy to use application programming framework, access to our computational resources for analyzing that data.

We see this as an unprecedented platform for data-mining meaningful information out of this treasure trove of historical, current and future earth observation data. Ultimately it will be many petabytes of earth observation information.”

Google expressly places this within their non-profit arm, with the plan to enable the storage and add the computing capacity, but not to create any algorithms or conduct any monitoring themselves. This new site will act as a tremendous enabler for the spread of remote sensing data and analysis, and can ultimately become the kind of c0-laboratory that was envisioned in Al Gore’s Digital Earth speech.

Read the full interview here.

With a lot of smart phones now provisioned with capable Google Maps navigation and directions, handheld GPS devices need to continue to innovate in order to stay relevant. A dedicated GPS device still makes a lot of sense for outdoor recreation off the beaten path and away from cell phone networks that can serve up other navigation services.

Yesterday’s announcement that Garmin has invested in Intermap’s detailed 3D digital mapping data, makes good sense. This high-resolution data far exceeds the quality and detail for 3D terrain, a critical element for back-country navigation. We’re seeing a similar approach from DeLorme with their recent addition of the SPOT emergency locator to communicate with text messages via satellite in areas where there is no cell phone signal. These moves continue to make these devices relevant to the outdoor enthusiast, who are the primary market for these devices into the future.

There’s a nice feature in today’s New York Times that outlines the use of open mapping tools to deal with a crisis. The focus is on Ushahidi, with the title, “Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis”.

“This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information. And an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label as truth.”

Read the full feature from the New York Times here.

The U.S. State Department launched a new data visualization site called Opinion Space yesterday. The online data visualization tool gives you the means to gauge how your own opinions stack up to those of others around the world. The visualization isn’t aligned to geographic space, but instead maps opinion space by showcasing the consensus and moderate views. T opinion map aims to depolarize online comments while also allowing for a text-based sharing of “Ideas for Secretary of State Clinton.”

This innovative means to collect feedback is made possible through a partnership with the Berkeley Center for New Media. The idea to collect and map opinions over time will add a feedback mechanism and a sense of changing perceptions about the objectives of U.S. diplomacy and how these efforts are perceived both domestically and internationally.

The U.S. Census Bureau is hard at work on the 2010 Census, fighting technological hurdles and an apparent malaise about being counted. In order to highlight the tradition of the these population counts that occur ever 10 years, the agency has put together some highlights for each of the 23 counts that have taken place since 1790.

The “Through the Decades” website contains interesting facts about the population size, the number of census workers, any new types of questions or race categories, and any new technologies deployed to ease this monumental task. There are some fascinating facts here about the changing size and makeup of the population as well as the march of technology.

Here are some of the details about the progression of computers and geospatial tools:

• 1890 is the first year that census workers were given detailed maps to help complete their tasks, and it’s also the same year that an electric tabulating system was utilized for the count
• 1950 was the first time a computer was used to tabulate results, and it was also the first computer designed for civilian use
• 1960 was the first time that census results were digitally recorded (on magnetic tape)
• 1970 was the first time that census data products were made available digitally on magnetic tape.
• 1980 saw the creation of the State Data Center Program for easier access to digital data on computer tapes
• 1990 was the year that the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER), computer-based maps, was introduced. It also was the first year that data was released on CD-ROM
• 2000 was when the Internet became the primary means of distributing Census data
• 2010 won’t include the “long form” because this more detailed collection has been converted to the ongoing American Community Survey

Taken in 10 year chunks, this condensed history provides uncovers some trends about how society has changed, the growing role of technology for administration, and the way that Americans view themselves. The 2010 Census is less of a focal point for geospatial technologists given that the American Community Survey has provided much more detailed and ongoing data for spatial analysis, but it’s still the largest ongoing geographic data collection effort in the world.

Borrowing from federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s success with Web Services challenges for the District of Columbia in his Apps for Democracy challenge, the federal government is now poised to usher in an era of web services challenges for federal problem solving. A detailed 12-page memo was released on Monday to executive department heads and agencies that outlines the use of challenges for transparency and open government, with details on the potential benefits as well as an outline of many different types of prizes.

Geospatial tools are well poised to take advantage of this new Web Services paradigm shift, and individual developers as well as larger companies stand to benefit. With this big federal push, it stands to reason that states and local government will soon follow suit. If you’re a consultant or small service business owner, now’s the time to polish your web services skill sets and to forge alliances with other developers.

The Open Geospatial Consortium has been hard at work on many fronts to drive down barriers to interoperability and to facilitate more open dialog between organizations and institutions. I just conducted a Q&A with David Schell, founder and chairman of the board of OGC, in order to get up to date on the many initiatives. One of the more interesting areas for our coverage deals with the better sharing of information about global change, and I enjoyed Schell’s answer, paraphrased below.

“GI Science” as it’s usually used is still too narrow a term. “Interoperability science” encompasses what we are talking about. One of the first interoperability science issues we need to address is the issue of sharing of information between various data centers, and making research data more discoverable and accessible. Data centers can’t be stovepipes anymore, they have to be “loosely coupled,” so any data center can be accessed by any data provider or user, with appropriate permissions, of course.

We’ve been working toward this for years in terms of technical interoperability issues, and we have working groups in hydrology, Earth system science, etc. who are developing application schemas that meet their intra-community and inter-community data sharing needs. We see individual scientists and small groups in various projects moving in this direction, but what’s really needed is a cultural dialog.

The OGC working groups are hard at work on things like geosemantics, data quality and uncertainty, geospatial rights management, “table joining,” and many other challenges, and application domains are using the OGC to facilitate both technical and semantic interoperability.

This focus on interoperability science is a growing niche to drive through both process and workflow in order to deal with global change. Read the full interview with Schell for more insight into OGC’s ongoing work.

The White House released a list of appointees on Friday to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel that’s in charge of oversight and feedback on how the recovery dollars are being spent and communicated. The appointment that’s chiefly of interest here for geospatial users is Edward Tufte, professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale University. His books on the Visual Display of Quantitative Information place him as a key force for the concise and insightful display of information.

Tufte is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He includes several maps in his work, and his ideas have influenced cartographers equally among other infographics practitioners.

It’s great to see the emphasis here on crystal-clear communication of information in a visual fashion. Let’s hope that his counsel results in some interesting and concise condensations of critical information.

High quality videos from the GeoDesign Summit are now online and free for viewing. There are some excellent presentations there from a variety of presenters. I’d like to point out the video of Michael Gallis as a good starting point. He delves into the definition of GeoDesign in the context of government decision making and points out the promise for a “truly meaningful” toolset with outcomes on policy. The tone and delivery are exhilarating as a rallying cry to speed the adoption.