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If it's a clear day on Monday, GeoEye's satellites will capture incredible imagery of President Obama's second Inauguration and make them available for use by members of the media. These images will be transmitted back to Earth in near real-time and, expanding from GeoEye's approach for the 2009 Inauguration, released as interactive web maps produced by the team at Development Seed.
Journalists will be able to embed these maps directly into their online coverage, zooming in on certain areas and letting users pan around to see the crowds. They'll also be able to compare ceremony attendance from 2009 with this year via a slider comparison feature on the map itself. We're working with GeoEye to process their 2009 imagery and prepare the web maps ahead of Inauguration. To do this after post-processing required us to manually georeference the imagery, which we did using GDAL, QGIS, and MapBox Satellite. For a step-by-step walk-through on how we did that, check out this blog post.
On Monday watch for satellite maps of the Inauguration, and be sure to check out the panning and comparison features.
Chris Herwig is a data analyst at MapBox, where he uses open-source tools to wrangle and visualize complex data in innovative ways. His tools of choice include R, TileMill, GDAL, and PostGIS. Chris is passionate about open data, civic engagement, and governmental accountability. In his spare time, Chris engages the larger open data community through Occupy Data and other data-centric civic organizations and hackathons.
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