At a time when global disasters - bombings, forest fires, tsunamis and ice storms - are becoming seemingly frequent events, a small Kingston software company is developing a solution that one day could give revolutionary predictive abilities to disaster management teams.

GRIDS (Geographic Resources Integrated Data Solutions) has created Virtual Globe, a graphic mapping and data integration software system that allows users to watch an evolving disaster as if from the heavens and intelligently predict how to deal with it.

Frank Huntley, a GRIDS director, says Virtual Globe could give disaster relief managers unprecedented predictive modeling abilities.

"People will be able to see a disaster unfold from many perspectives all at once, through the eyes of a satellite, from the eyes of a bird and from the perspective of a fireman on the scene, all through a 3-D holographic image of the globe that can be changed to display whatever information best saves lives and dollars," Huntley says.

Michael Lea, Business Edge
GRIDS executives Frank Huntley, left, and Jeff Moxley see a huge world market as they develop the Virtual Globe system.

GRIDS is owned by founders Ramsey Robinson and Jeff Moxley, along with Huntley and Lynn Harding, who are the owners of software incubator company Kingston Software Factory, and Kingston marketing specialist Bob Pritchard.

Virtual Globe is designed to integrate real-time satellite images, maps, sensor information such as ozone levels and cloud cover, as well as other data such as weather, population concentrations, water and gas levels, forest cover and global positioning system (GPS) readings.

When combined, the information could help a disaster management team track just about any kind of disaster in real time.

One example where it could be used in Canada is fighting forest fires - by locating firefighting teams, water supplies and the most flammable forests so personnel and equipment could be moved to where they would have the greatest benefit. It could also be used to move local residents to keep them safe.

"The new software will allow them to react quickly and with more information about what was there - what should be there, like roads and dams - and what is there," Huntley says. "Thousands of lives and billions of dollars can be saved."

Huntley sees a huge world market for Virtual Globe, since about $1 billion in human loss and environmental damage per week is lost in the U.S. alone.

"It's a huge, huge market, so that's where we're aiming," Huntley says.

Disaster management is not the only use GRIDS sees for Virtual Globe, however. It could also be used for forestry and fishery conservation, as well as to track disease and predict outbreaks and patterns.

Virtual Globe has its foundations in such a two-dimensional health application.

In 2001, GRIDS was contracted by the federal government to produce an Internet-based health-surveillance system that could be accessed through a free website known as Public Health Watch.

The site was intended to allow users access to health information from multiple sources, including Statistics Canada demographic data, and to manipulate the data with analysis tools. Maps on the website would track diseases and viruses and provide users with related specialists.

Phase 2 of the project was to be a fee-for-service initiative where GRIDS and its partners would build specialized applications for people. A third level was to include a consultancy service for people based on their organization's data and would build specialized applications.

GRIDS was discussing Public Health Watch with the Ontario government but the project, which was not ready to launch, was dropped during the 2003 SARS outbreak, Huntley says. "Government interests shifted to the immediate crisis, so we just kind of got bumped off the table."

Developers at GRIDS also had another problem they had not anticipated - jurisdictional concerns made getting some health-care data next to impossible. That glitch arose out of security problems and privacy concerns - even though the information used would not have identified individuals.

Public Health Watch still exists in what Huntley calls a light form, but has so far not achieved the goals GRIDS set out for it.

The light version is run by the South Eastern Ontario Health Information Partnerships, a provincial health organization based in the Kingston Frontenac Lennox and Addington Health Unit. The health unit uses it to share its statistics with other health-care service providers and researchers. There is also a website the public can use.

Huntley says GRIDS expects to soon announce a full-fledged version of Public Health Watch through a partnership with a medical group.

The Canadian Space Agency also recently bought a licence to use Virtual Globe. Lyse Champagne, the agency's project manager for the Earth Observation Application Development Program, says the CSA made the purchase because it supports developing innovative Canadian technologies and because the federal government may want to use it when it is further developed.

"The interest is that this grid, and the associated indexing system that Virtual Globe is based on, allows for visualization and manipulation of extremely large data sets," Champagne says. "You could use it for biodiversity research, environmental monitoring, analysing global trends, such as climate change, basically for visualizing and analyzing data on a very large scale."

While it is not the space agency's mandate to do this kind of research, the federal government might take advantage of the technology to monitor the environment and climate change, she says.

Champagne says the European Space Agency has taken an interest in Virtual Globe, although Huntley will not discuss it. Huntley says, however, that Virtual Globe has some serious challenges ahead, including figuring out how to deliver and integrate all the many kinds of data that goes to users.

"To store a satellite image of the Earth accurately at sufficiently high resolution would take more space than there is on the Internet," he says.

There is also the challenge of displaying satellite pictures, maps, sensor data and other information together as a virtual globe in a visual manner - all in real time, without distortion or error.

"The major obstacle is just so much information - it's gridded in different ways," Huntley says. "A road map is a series of vectors and a map of a city may be working in city blocks, while a satellite operates in pixels, which are round circles. How do you map all these things on to each other?

"That's the most difficult and that's the Holy Grail problem," he says. "If we solve that problem, we'll take the market."

(Frank Armstrong can be reached at armstrong@businessedge.ca)