Day 1 of the Location Intelligence conference. Simon and I spent a fun 40 minutes talking to Andrew Pitcairn from GlobeXplorer, a satellite imagery provider. Think the Keyhole satellite photos from Google Maps, but on methamphetamines. Their booth backdrop is a beautiful high res shot of western San Francisco based on a 3-inches-per-pixel satellite image, and their tech is as stunning as their backdrop.
They have over 500Tb of images, adding up to 1T/week more. For example, at the moment they’re adding 500,000 km2 of 2004 images. They have over 2M km2 of Digital Globe content. Most of their images are 6-inch and sub-meter resolution from around the world, although they do have some 3-inch in there. They sell to consumers ($35 gets you a 3000×2000 pixel download of your neighbourhood) but most of their images are served to business customers via web services.
All this is served by open source software. They’re running MapServer to serve their >2M images/day. They do a lot of reprojecting on the fly, and have added a ton of parcel data from around the US as part of a realtor-focused business. This lets you overlay parcel boundaries, flood plains, assessed values, etc. on the images. Those regions and the metadata are all kept in PostgreSQL.
It’s real interesting watching what they’ve done. They’re not just serving images through web services, they’re also integrating a lot of data on the fly using web services, the Open Geospatial Consortium‘s WFS and WMS web services. I’d heard a lot of the pipe dreams around web services, but it was extremely cool to see this working seamlessly in the real world, and being built on open source was icing on the cake.