It led to work with NASA, which had just created a very rudimentary virtual Earth called NASA World Wind, and to a 2002 contract with the U.S. This experience led Johnson and her team to start studying how the human brain consumes data.
“We made a 3D movie that allowed everyone to see, over time, how the contamination had entered into the soil, migrated into the aquifer, and contaminated this whole area outside of Scottsdale, Arizona. There, again, she confronted the difficulty of making decisions on the basis of flat maps and data tables. Next, Johnson was an expert witness on one of the largest toxic tort litigations in U.S. “The bugs and bunnies people could look at the soil conditions, the water, and the different types of transport mechanisms that were out there.” This ability to visualize the contents of relational databases was new at the time.
Her company created a common operating portal that allowed everyone to upload all of their data and maps and then see them together. “The client was having a very difficult time trying to integrate all those different sciences into one conceptual model that people could use to make good decisions,” Johnson recalls. The project required coordinating many scientific experts and building public consensus on such things as soil and water data, human health and risk assessment, vegetation, and air quality. However, Google will stop supporting GEE in March 2017.Ĭarla Johnson’s first company, an environmental engineering firm called Waterstone, entered the geospatial world in the late 1990s, when it worked on the closing of the Rocky Flats plutonium trigger plant in Colorado.
However, it allows users to perform only minimal geographic analysis, such as displaying elevation profiles, measuring distances and, with the Pro version, measuring areas.īuilding on GE, Google Earth Enterprise (GEE) allows organizations to store and process terabytes of imagery, terrain, and vector data on their own servers, as well as to publish maps securely for their users to view using GE desktop or mobile apps, or through their own application using the Google Maps API. However, they rarely contain all the data and functions required to answer complex geographic questions, such as, “How many square miles of corn does the Kansas River watershed contain in Nebraska above 150 meters of elevation?” Using a geographic information system to answer such questions requires substantial training and access to all the right datasets.īy launching Google Earth (GE) a little more than 15 years ago, Google popularized a version of a digital or virtual Earth that requires neither training nor importing datasets to explore the entire planet-though at differing resolutions, roughly directly proportional to the amount of economic activity in each area. Online maps can be updated frequently and some aspects, such as traffic, can reflect changes in real time. LIVE Maps mobile app shows real-time player location, score, rank and more for all PGA TOUR events, by Earthvisionz Paper maps obsolesce rapidly from the moment they are printed, because the ink on the paper remains the same while the world changes-though faster in mid-Manhattan than in the middle of the Mojave Desert.