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| Midnight, Interesting post, will share a little personal experience that may or may not shed any light on use or lack of use of these tools.
A few years ago, links and images such as you have posted would have fascinated me, and I would have spent/wasted a couple of days digging into it and figuring out all the cool things we could do. That interest has declined substantially over the years and here is why:
1) Very little in the way of a "support group" for this kind of stuff. This page is filled with autosteer/hardware/equipment type info and knowledge, there is very little in the way of data discussions. My experience is that is pretty representative of the ag community at large. I can probably count on a couple of hands the number of people I am aware of that I think really are interested in doing "innovative" things regarding the intersection of agriculture data and mapping. And the ones I know are using fairly diverse tools and methods to accomplish fairly unique things so the interest or desire to work together in any fashion just isn't there.
2) We are still stuck with the reality of when you get all done what are you actually going to do. Sure I can endlessly model my data, lots of fancy statistics and work, but in the end I am simply going to spread X amount of fertilizer at a given location and maybe vary that slightly at another. All the "rocket science" stuff really hasn't come to much in the way of actual, beneficial, application.
3) Which ties into my final thought that the existing tools are more than adequate, and quite frankly far more efficient to use than a lot of this Web 2.0, online stuff. When all I want is a yield or basic VRT map, I really don't care how many layers of 3-D base data I can add....
So from my standpoint, I see very little interest from the ag community in "playing around" with these kind of tools, I suppose people that are into that sort of thing simply left agriculture for greener pastures. And there is little to indicate commercial payback to significant investment in these tools, hence the slow adoption pace.
Having said all that, I suspect adoption could easily follow the yield monitor/guidance model. We started with yield monitors, never did live up to their promise on a large scale, but have now just become fairly standard equipment on new combines (and therefore used combines in a few years), while the guidance stuff has pretty much taken over precision ag in a way we never imagined fifteen years ago. Probably the same with a lot of this mapping technology, will find beneficial ways to use down the road that we can't visualize today.
One example of that I think is machinery tracking/management applications that several vendors have come out with. I think at least a couple integrate with google maps/earth, and a perfect application. You have multiple units in the field, having lots of good base data is very useful for seeing where everything is at, and you need a real-time online interface to communicate back and forth anyway. but that is a lot different application than data processing.
Darin
Edited by dgrimm 3/24/2008 12:08
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Free Tools for Google Earthj
