Eye on Earth is a two-way communication platform on the environment which brings together scientific information with feedback and observations of millions of ordinary people. It is the result of a partnership between Microsoft and the European Environment Agency (EEA). Currently, it includes information on the water quality for more than 22.000 bathing sites throughout Europe. Eye on Earth also includes information on air quality for more than 1000 air quality monitoring stations throughout Europe.

The official Microsoft case study can be found here.

Eye on Earth makes use of the technological innovations of Microsoft Cloud Computing to combine environmental data with geospatial data through Microsoft’s Bing Maps for enterprise and to enable the general public to contribute their knowledge with simple communication tools. The technology deployed will evolve into an early detection system using satellite data in combination with in-situ data and helping to scale the information from global to local level. The reverse is also true. Local observations contributed by day-to-day users will be comparable with the global observations of environmental change.  Pretty Cool!