March 27, 2008 (Computerworld) People who are unable to travel to Washington to view the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and pay homage to the more than 58,000 men and women who lost their lives or were missing in action in the Vietnam War can now view a virtual version of the memorial online.
Yesterday, Footnote.com, a company that archives historical documents, and The National Archives and Records Administration launched a searchable, virtual replica of the Wall, said Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.
Wilding noted that the day of the launch was also the 26th anniversary of the groundbreaking for construction of the memorial, more commonly known as "the Wall." The actual memorial, a pair of 246-foot black granite walls, was completed in November 1982 and officially became a National Monument two years later.
The project came about quite by accident, Wilding said.
"On one of our trips to the National Archives, our vice president of social media actually ran by the Vietnam Wall and was so amazed with the people there and so impressed with what a sacred place it was," Wilding said. "And as he stood looking at the wall, he said 'You know that's a document,' and that's what we do -- we digitize documents."
Wilding said he contacted Peter Krogh, a National Geographic photographer, who took more than 1,500 photographs of the Wall and stitched them together to create one digital replica of the memorial. The National Archives then provided Footnote with the personal records and casualty reports, which were linked to every name on the virtual Wall, Wilding said.
"People can come on the site, search the site, find the name on the Wall, and it's the actual image of the Wall," Wilding said. "The beautiful thing is, you go to the name and find the name, and it will bring up the complete service record and the casualty report for that individual. And it's very easy to click a button and upload a photo or add a comment about that individual, so you can create a memorial for the individuals there who have served and whose names appear."
Wilding said users can also create memorial pages for the other 2.5 million veterans who served in Vietnam. Uploading photos or creating story pages is free, he said. Users only have to sign up for a free account. Some information on the Footnote.com site can only be accessed for a fee.
According to Footnote, the process for creating the virtual Wall took five months to complete.
After getting permission from the National Park Service to photograph the memorial, Krogh and his team faced two major challenges: First, they had to figure out how to photograph the Wall's highly polished and reflective black granite surface. To do that, team members held black boards to remove the reflections as Krogh photographed each of the Wall's 140 panels.
Second, the team had to find a way to make each name as big on a computer screen as it was on the Wall. Krogh then had to photograph the Wall by hand without special equipment or tripods because he was not allowed to temporarily remove the short chain fence in front of the Wall to get a better shot.
Although the company felt that it was important to stay true to the experience of the actual memorial and let users browse the Wall as a single image, but the image Krogh delivered was 400,000 pixels wide (460 feet if you were to view it on a computer screen that was big enough). And it would require a computer with 40GB of RAM to view the image.
So the Footnote development team devised a way to quickly decode the compressed image into small enough "tiles" that could be handled by any computer with a browser.
Finally, the team had to identify each name and its position on the memorial image with the military data supplied by the national archives. To do that, the imaging team developed a batch of algorithms to simplify the image and decipher each of the 58,320 names found on the Wall. After all the names were identified and located on the virtual Wall, the team linked those names to nearly 40MB of public military databases.
"The only problem is that there's been so much traffic since yesterday, some of the pages and images are taking a long time to load, but we're working hard to fix that," Wilding said.
at a city or town near you.
Coming to a city or town near you. 
