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[low static humming]
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[sprawling atmospheric music]
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♪ ♪
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- Welcome
to the geospatial revolution.
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- In a world
where everybody's texting,
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geospatial technology
is critical to understanding
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what's happening
at a particular location.
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- It's the speed
of the internet.
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It's the capability
of remote sensing satellites.
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It's software like Google Earth.
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Taken altogether,
you have an explosion
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in the way we view the Earth.
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- Everybody's somewhere,
everything's someplace,
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and a map is a way of organizing
all of that information.
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- It's information
from aircraft, from satellites.
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It can be a collection
of information
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from a tower that you've set up.
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- We've been using maps
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for hundreds and hundreds
of years
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to know where we are.
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Now that nice lady tells me
which way to turn.
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- Turn right
then turn left.
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- Virtually all
of the information
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that you're sharing
with anybody these days
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has some kind
of geospatial tag on it.
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- It's really the human element.
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There's basically this entire
information ecosystem
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that we have access to now.
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- I can receive information.
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I can transmit information.
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I can broadcast my location.
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And that is revolutionary.
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- It's amazing.
It's cutting-edge.
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It's--
well, changing the world.
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- In 1/10 mile,
turn right at stop sign.
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- Some people
will call this a GPS.
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It's not.
It's a GPS receiver.
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It is, I think it's fair to say,
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a miracle of science
and technology.
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It's able to collect signals
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from global positioning
satellites far up in space.
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- Each one of them is,
every moment of every day,
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saying, "This is the location
that I'm at
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in orbit around the Earth."
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If you know where you are
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with respect
to three satellite points,
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you can use mathematics
to determine
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where you must be
on the face of the Earth.
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- There are millions
of coordinates
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encoded in this box.
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- Recalculating.
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- And it can take
those coordinates
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and render a map
on the screen for you.
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- Turn left on Whitehall Road.
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Then turn left in 0.3 miles.
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- Where do all those coordinates
come from?
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Where do those streets
come from?
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Lots and lots of people driving
special cars continuously
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up and down every single road
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and digitizing those roads
into a database
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that then can be downloaded
into this little box.
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[electronic beep]
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- There's nothing new
about mapping.
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You can imagine
without being able to talk,
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somebody showing
where you're going,
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and draw a line
showing where the river is
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and an X where they are now
and an X where they're gonna go.
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- Viewing the Earth has really
been based on technology.
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The Babylonians etched
the lay of the land
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on clay tablets in 2300 B.C.
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And then in the 15th century,
with the advent of printing,
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they started making maps
using wooden blocks.
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- Surveyors would map
by making measurements
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in front of them
to a reference point
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and then back behind
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to the reference point
they had just passed.
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That information had to be
transcribed into a map.
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- From in the air,
it's as if we sent out
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thousands of surveyors
all at once.
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Remotely sensed data provides
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highly accurate measurements
of the Earth
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and the features upon it.
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[rocket rumbling]
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- We rely on satellites
for pictures of the Earth,
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for communications,
for navigation, for weather.
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- Geospatial technology
has become woven
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throughout the fabric
of how we live.
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- About 50 years ago,
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people came along
and started building
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on big old mainframes
geographic information systems
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which would integrate on a map
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information about culture,
about population,
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about demographics,
about physical environment.
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GIS allows us
to bring it all together.
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- I used the first
commercial GPS receiver.
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Took two men to carry it.
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Our antenna was a meter-square
piece of aluminum.
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We had to have
a generator for it,
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massive batteries.
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- The census bureau
in the United States
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needed to capture
all of the line work for roads,
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railroads, hydrography,
and then boundaries.
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That formed the basis
of the first TIGER files
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in the late 1980s
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in support of the 1990 census.
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Tiger was an impetus
to technological developments
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like MapQuest, Yahoo,
followed by Google.
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- Google Earth introduced people
to the coolness of place.
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"I am here.
Where's the nearest Starbucks?"
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Or, "Where's
the nearest hospital?"
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- Now we're all
carrying around GPS.
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We've got really rich interfaces
that allow us to do things
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that we would only imagine
previously.
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- On a mobile device,
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you are the center of the map,
and the city is around you,
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not you see a city and then
look for yourself on the map.
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It's putting you in the map.
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[electronic tone]
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[horn honks]
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[phone rings]
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- Say you find yourself
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in a location
that you don't know very well.
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You might want to find a place
to have dinner.
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Well, what places are around?
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And which places have
other people rated very highly?
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Maybe you want
a particular kind of food
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within a 15-minute walk.
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- I've got not only
a restaurant,
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but I've got the map.
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I can find the reviews of it.
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I can find out what the menu is.
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- We're moving away
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from me having to actively
search for something
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to now search is telling me
what I should check out
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that might be interesting to me.
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These are the things
where location and search
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start to come together.
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- We're becoming
individual sensors.
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We're creating
this huge sensor network
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of people holding
these mobile devices.
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And that information is two-way.
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[electronic beeping]
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- It's not just
passive collection,
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listen to your GPS technology
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tell you how to get
to some place.
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You're gonna say,
"Wait a minute.
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"I see a problem.
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"I want to report that problem.
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I want to see that someone's
going to respond to that."
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- We were playing basketball.
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We see, like, the ground
keep on moving.
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I see a lot of people,
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some of them dying,
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like the ceiling,
like, killed them.
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- I have both
extended family members
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and close family members
who live in Haiti,
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and the first reaction
was more, like, surreal,
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"Is this really happening?"
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- We needed to know
where we could go in,
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and so we used
geospatial technology
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to prepare the area
with information
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before we even got there.
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- Approximately 2/3 of the
cell towers stayed active.
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And aid workers
and Haitian nationals
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were posting information
saying that they needed help.
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- I was watching CNN
and immediately called
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our USHAHIDI tech lead
in Atlanta
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I told him that we really
need to move
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and set up
an USHAHIDI platform for Haiti.
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- USHAHIDI is
an open-source platform
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for crowd-sourcing
crisis information.
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Basically, that means
you are following local media,
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Twitter, Facebook,
text messages,
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any sort of information
you can get.
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Once you aggregate
this information, you map it,
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you have a real-time picture
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of the actual situation
on the ground.
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This information can be used
by rescue workers
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or anyone.
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- With an USHAHIDI platform,
you can decide
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what kind of map
you want to use.
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OpenStreetMap
uses crowd-sourcing
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to do street mapping.
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And within a few days,
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OpenStreetMap had
the most detailed map of Haiti
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that was available.
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- There were maps of Haiti
before the earthquake,
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but they just weren't
up-to-date anymore.
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So people started using donated
satellite imagery
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to trace in OpenStreetMap
collapsed buildings,
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clinics, hospitals.
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- Within a week or so,
we had trained
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over 100 individuals
at Tufts University
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to map the incidents
and the alerts.
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And then a text number,
4636, was set up.
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for reporting.
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But these text messages
were all going to be in Creole.
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So we started getting as many
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Creole-speaking volunteers
as possible.
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- And you go to...
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- I found out
about the 4636 effort
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through a friend of mine.
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So I got online,
started getting involved,
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basically staying up late
after putting the kids to bed,
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try to translate as many
text messages as I could.
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- Our top priority
is Port-au-Prince.
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- It's good.
It's got translations.
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- There was this energy.
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- Today's SMS.
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- People from basically
all over the world
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creating this
sort of, like, support system
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over the internet.
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- A soccer stadium was serving
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as a camp
for displaced persons.
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But we didn't know it was there.
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Through USHAHIDI's
mapping ability,
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we knew that that would be
a location to take aid.
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We wouldn't have seen it
without them.
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- USHAHIDI alerted the world
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that if you've got needs
in Haiti
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or you're trapped in a building
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or you're out of food
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or you're injured
and you need help
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that you can alert us.
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- Whether you are that person
in Des Moines, Iowa,
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who's reading Twitter
or Facebook
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or you're a Haitian
on the ground,
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with mobile technology
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and open-sourcing
of information,
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you're suddenly empowered.
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- I work by California.
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- Being able to stay online
translating those text messages,
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and you know that
that information
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will be forwarded directly
to a specific aid organization.
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That made it feel like almost
I was on the ground helping.
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- A map is worth
a million words.
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Maps communicate with everybody.
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That's powerful.
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You know, you can make
a difference.
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You can look at relationships
and patterns
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and processes and models,
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help save the world.
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- I don't think we can project
50 years out,
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but given
what we're seeing today,
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it's just a fantastic explosion
of location technology.
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And location-based data.
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And now we have the devices
to read it
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and capture it
and visualize it.
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And that's something
that's really helping
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the geospatial revolution
truly explode.
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- Revolutions rarely end up
the way they started.
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That's almost the definition
of a revolution.
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[dramatic musical crescendo]
