With the recent acquisition of the 2005 aerial photography of the White House, I decided to look over the computer generated meta-data that came bundled with the .tif file from the USGS. What I found was somewhat surprising in that the USGS makes note that “No metadata were received with this data.”
This essentially means that not only is the White House itself redacted, but the agency/corporation that took the pictures has been redacted as well. In the 2002 meta-data, it explicitly states the name of the corporation that was contracted to take the aerial photography, EarthData International of Maryland, LLC. Yet in the 2005 meta-data this information is suspiciously absent.
I must ask why? Was it done using government planes or was it contracted out? Moreover, why should this fact be removed from the meta-data?
To say the aerial photography magically arrived on the USGS servers is one thing, but to say that it was acquired by EarthData International of Maryland, LLC then processed at a USGS facility gives a better picture of the process involved in the creation of this imagery.
After the fold are the two meta-data files from the 2002 and 2005 USGS orthphotography. Of note is that there is more detailed information about the process invoved to create the 2005 orthoimagery, yet the source of it is withheld.
Daniel Denk at RemoteSensingTools has an interesting take on this issue.
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