Imagine: a community of local governments, utilities, and businesses, just like yours, that has Internet access to multiple levels of integrated geographic data.
Imagine: a multi-layer data visualization system available through the Internet to municipalities, utilities, commercial, environmental, and non-profit groups, and other organizations with interests just like yours. Just think of the possibilities for your community, your business, and your quality of life.
Does it exist? You bet! It's called the Bay Area Digital GeoResource - or BADGER- and it's a model for public and private access to Earth science data over the Internet. It's located online at http://badger.parl.com
What exactly is BADGER, and how does it work? BADGER, a non-profit community resource, is an online visualization system for geographic data of the San Francisco Bay Area developed from satellite and aerial imagery, maps, and databases. The system is available through the Internet to the groups noted above, as well as others. Environmental features, underground services, property lines, municipal zones, census data, and demographic information are depicted in BADGER's multi-layer visualization system.
David Milgram, principal investigator for the BADGER project, believes that coordinating imagery with ground data is a key to growing this type of data application. Matched satellite imagery and facility maps help utilities locate equipment damaged by storms or earthquakes. Real estate companies, insurers, and homeowners can reach decisions more quickly when viewing imagery overlaid with legal property lines.
Local businesses use the system to identify specific groups of homeowners for targeted marketing campaigns (for example, those with swimming pools or shake roofs). The BADGER team is working to assist entrepreneurs in building these and other applications. They can assist you, too.
The BADGER system is extremely useful for a number of other applications, including regional emergency planning and operations, environmental impact reporting, hazardous materials management, utility planning and maintenance, traffic congestion management, commercial marketing, and land development. Can you think of others?
The BADGER Web site offers over fifteen gigabytes of imagery and related geographic data describing the San Francisco Peninsula, including San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara Counties, with a goal of complete nine-county coverage. BADGER is being built as part of a cooperative agreement between Lockheed Martin and NASA. The Bay Area Shared Information Consortium (BASIC), a nonprofit corporation set up to foster data sharing, is managing the on-line service and providing user support.
BADGER is testing its business strategy in the virtual marketplace. This beta phase provides the development team with feedback from the user community while ensuring that the on-line service is robust and effective. During beta testing, you can set up a free user account with the BADGER On-Line Service to download imagery and related data sets to your desktop for further analysis. All that is required is that you help the BADGER team by describing how you plan to use the data. Once the beta test is concluded,
BADGER will add commercial imagery and value-added data sets to its catalog. You may then purchase the data from the service using credit cards and Internet "virtual cash." Data can be delivered directly over the Internet, on digital tape or CD-ROM, or as large-format photographs.
Interested in BADGER? Want to explore the possibilities of having a system like BADGER for YOUR community? Visit http://badger.parl.com and see for yourself how valuable this service can be.
Curator: Randolph Kim
Responsible NASA Official: Mark
Leon
Last Updated: 07/02/2002
