What I want to do

On July 31th 2014, a series of gas explosions occurred in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, following reports of gas leaks earlier that night. 32 people were killed and 308 others were injured, many roads were damaged as a result.

Two days later (August 2nd), a reasearch team from Kaohsiung University sent Quadcopter to take arial shots from the site. A serie of photos was released in CC 3.0 BY license http://140.127.218.152/

I wanted to understand all these photos with context, so I tried MapKnitter.

My attempt and results

mapknitter.org/map/view/2014-kaohsiung-gas-explosions-4

The final result used 39 shots within the context. I knew that it was a devastating explosion, but I was quite shocked by the broad range of the map.

The initial challenge I had in using MapKnitter was that I wanted to fit every shots to the map. Fitting images are hard, especially the transformation part. I then go for a Breadth First approach, trying to cover a wide range first, and just picked the photos with as little transformation as possible (since the shots are made by Quadcopter, there are many shots that require zero transformation, and just scalling / rotating).

The other problem I faced was in the output, my output map didn't have the JPEG version, or couldn't be viewed in the Web Viewer, I later solved this issue by changing to a lower than recomended resolution (20 cm/px).

Questions and next steps

There are many videos / shots of the explosions (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%E9%AB%98%E9%9B%84%E6%B0%A3%E7%88%86) and one should be able to map these multi media back to the map, along with the exact location of death (currently not been fully disclosed).