Slashgeo

An anonymous voxel writes "Japan's ALOS satellite with PRISM, AVNIR-2 & PALSAR sensors is now operational and accepting orders for data. More information in English from: http://www.alos-restec.jp/index_e.html". From the website: "ALOS Data products became available for purchase via RESTEC’s Online Data Service System (CROSS) on October 24, 2006. For the starter, RESTEC [Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan] is offering Standard Products and Derivative-work Products (GeoTIFF or NITF format of Standard Product). Value Added Products, such as Ortho-rectified Image or Pan Sharpen Image, will be coming shortly." From a previous story: "The ALOS satellite will be carrying two high-resolution optical (AVNIR-2 and PRISM) and one L-band fully polarimetric SAR instruments (PALSAR)."

The Google Earth Blog discuss the Malaria Atlas Project. From this ScienceDaily article: "Researchers from Kenya and Oxford will use information from satellites, population censuses and other electronic data related to factors that determine the presence of mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasites and the likelihood they will infect humans. Statistical approaches will enable comparisons to be made between areas where information exists with areas where there is no information to fill in the "gaps" to create a global map of malaria risk worldwide." Here's the project's website.

In the context of the launch of the South African Space Portal NASA World Wind page, The Earth is Square links to the South African Space Portal. From the blog: "The current dataset includes the following: * South Africa 50k Topo maps. * Africa 250k Topo maps. o South Africa o Lesotho o Malawi o Mozambique o Namibia o Swaziland o Zambia o Zimbabwe * Various areas with aerial imagery. " Somewhat related, The Map Room links to a collection of 16th-20th century maps of Africa.

The Earth is Square tells us NASA World Wind should get a large amount of new imagery. From the blog: "That is how much "raw" data is waiting on the new World Wind Central servers to be processed and added into the World Wind ZoomIt! layer. This includes imagery from the USGS, all of Pennsylvania at high resolution and several other sources."

Ogle Earth reports on a new "browser" from Japan. Here is their summary "New geobrowser alert: The Cosmos Globalbase Browser, out of Japan. There are instructions in English, but language remains a bit of a barrier, and often I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to be doing. Still, it's all brand new, there appears to be open-source origins, and the premise is an interesting one:"

It's still quite cryptic as to what it is so perhaps we can discuss in comments. From what I gathered when I quickly glanced over it was that it is a way to build a global cache of geospatial data, or a way to create a huge data repository with data from all around the web???

ragnvald writes "This is an announcement of the availability of Quarter Degree Grid Cells (QDGC) on a national level for African countries: www.qdgc.org. QDGC (or QDS — Quarter degree Squares) are a way of dividing the longitude latitude degree square cells into smaller squares, forming in effect a system of geocodes. QDGC represents a way of making (almost) equal area squares covering a specific area to represent specific qualities of the area covered. The squares themselves are based on the degree squares covering the Earth. QDGC is currently used as a geocoding system for atlases. It has been used quite a lot on the African continent as the suitability is best between +40/-40 latitude degrees of the Equator. Examples are “The atlas of southern African birds” by Harrison et al (1997), Tanzania Bird Atlas (www.tanzaniabirdatlas.com) and Tanzania Mammal Atlas (www.tanzaniamammals.org) to have mentioned some. Read the full story here: QDGC release story at www.qdgc.org"

The Fantom Planet blog discuss the announcement of China and Brazil offering free CBERS imagery to African countries. Here's the official CBERS website and the incomplete wikipedia page. The article's introduction: " China and Brazil will give Africa free satellite imaging of its landmass to help the continent respond to threats like deforestation, desertification and drought, the two countries said Wednesday. A land imaging satellite launched by the two governments at a cost of some 100 million dollars in September, would relay images, updated monthly, to four ground stations for dissemination to African states." Several Africa-related stories below.

From the GeoNames Blog : "Spot Image, a leading provider of satellite imagery, are making a fantastic offer. Spot Image are teaming up with GeoNames to help improve the availability of free geographical data and offer high resolution 2.5m satellite imagery for automatic feature extraction.

Features that we think can be extracted from 2.5m imagery are city contours, airports, streets, shore lines, lakes, rivers and others. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and student-works to find algorithms for feature identification and extraction. Drop me a line for more details if you are doing research in this area and would like to work on this challenging task."

For a better overview and links of importance, please visit the GeoNames Blog.

The Google Lat Long blog announced their March vector data update, with Africa, Asia and the Caribbean being the main winners. From the announcement: "We've added roads in 58 countries in Africa, 32 in Asia, and 4 in the Caribbean -- now both Maps and Earth provide the same roads coverage. We've also launched business listings layers for Brazil and a few cities in Russia to help you find the right restaurant or bank, for example, in case you crave a special type of food or you run out of cash." Related stories copied below.

The Earth is Square blog informs us about GeoMapApp, a virtual globe using the NWW Java API. From the entry: " GeoMapApp is a data exploration and visualization tool that is continually being expanded as part of the Marine Geoscience Data System. [...] But more than that, this is a very good example of how useful the WWJava API is, instead of having a full virtual globe and adding to it, you just add the globe view to your application."