mapped every public camera and sensor feed I could find. Free, no login, AGPL. Would like it torn apart.
I'm a CS student and I've spent the last few months building this.
It's a live map of public sensor feeds, the stuff governments already publish and almost nobody reads, because it comes out as XML on a page from 2011.
It's free, there's no account, no API key and nothing to install. The source is AGPL-3.0 and public:
https://provenance-online.vercel.app/ https://github.com/011-sam-110/Provenance
What's actually on it right now (measured today, these numbers move quickly as I continue to work on it):
- 19,748 road cameras: across 12 networks: Castle Rock 511 (13,136), Oregon TripCheck (1,141), DriveBC (1,060), TfL London (882), Caltrans (863), Finland Digitraffic (809), South Carolina DOT (768), Traffic Scotland (415), NZTA (319), Estonia (179), Iceland (165), CET São Paulo (11). Every one sits at its real coordinates, links back to its own source, and shows when it was last sampled.
- 37 signal layers: USGS and EMSC earthquakes, NASA FIRMS active fires, GDACS disaster alerts, NOAA cyclones and space weather, IODA internet outages, 702 TeleGeography submarine cables, UNHCR displacement, GDELT conflict and protest coding, abuse.ch C2 infrastructure, and others. All off by default. You turn on what you want.
The part I actually want feedback on.
I took an earlier build into an OSINT Discord last week and got taken apart, fairly. The short version was: "we've seen hundreds of these, they're all the same project, and we can't rely on the data anyway, because verification is the work". Kind of heart shattering but I'll move on and improve what needs improving.
I don't think a dashboard answers this issue, and I've stopped believing it will. But one thing did come out of it that I've been building around since:
- Observations: a camera frame, an ADS-B ping, a seismometer reading. A machine can be trusted to carry these.
- Interpretations: "this protest is left-wing", "this aircraft is military", "this country is unstable". A machine is bad at these and shouldn't render them at the same visual weight as a fact.
Nearly every complaint I can find about tools in this category is really about the second class being dressed up as the first. So I'm labelling every layer by which one it is, and demoting the ones that are somebody's static claim about a place rather than a live reading. That's the actual project now; the map is just how you look at it.
What's broken right now, so you don't have to find it:
- The aircraft layer is capped, not empty. It's showing 3,000 aircraft against 5,108 available, because I cap the response. It comes from community ADS-B receivers and it's thin outside North America and Europe, so treat the count as a lower bound rather than a world total.
- 4 of the 37 layers need API keys I don't have and sit dormant (ACLED, AIS, ENTSO-E grid load, ReliefWeb). The other 33 are returning data. They're marked, but marked isn't fixed.
It's an upcoming tool rather than a finished one, and I'd rather have criticism than traffic, especially on: whether the observation/interpretation split is the right line to draw, and which feeds I'm obviously missing.
Thanks for any input!
Best,
Sam
https://provenance-online.vercel.app/ https://github.com/011-sam-110/Provenance