It’s been nearly 5 months since Google Earth’s release (on the PC), and winter is upon us in the northern hemisphere. Providing information about ski resort conditions sounds like a natural candidate for Google Earth/Maps enhancement, and now the good folks behind www.vlogmap.org have come out with ridertech.com, which offers video reviews of conditions in the north-western US, live webcams where available, weather updates and a geographic database viewable with both Maps and Earth.
With the level of detail that Google Earth affords (and also the ability to depict slopes in 3D), I can imagine future versions of this database breaking down the data to the level of individual ski runs, mapping them, annotating them socially, and offering live conditions, perhaps with hi-res overlays provided by the resorts themselves. Google could become an integral planning tool to any ski outing, especially if resorts step up with a willingness to provide geographic data for the consumption of sites like ridertech.
Brian Timoney of the Timoney Group has just launched a most impressive site: Envisioning Jonah Gas, “a website that presents a multifaceted view of the Jonah gas field in Sublette County, Wyoming exclusively through Google Earth data layers.”
There are geological overlays, map overlays, overlays with pipes and fields, and most impressive of all, 3D-representations of gas production across the field. In all cases, a 3D GIS viewer like Google Earth is the clear choice for visualizing such information in the most effective manner possible. It also helps that the site is clear, clean and smartly laid out.
The big picture here is that companies with natural assets such as oil fields or forests might want to start providing their shareholders with geographical representations of what they’ve invested in. Instead of just putting tables of figures and the odd chart in quarterly reports, why not post a KML file online illustrating these results geographically (just like www.jonahgas.com does)? It’s still cheaper than glossy paper, and far more impressive:-)
While a few days ago it seemed like John Hanke was indicating Google might be content to just use it’s Earth as a backdrop for geobrowsing, today brings a job ad for Google Earth that looks a bit more ambitious:
The Keyhole group is hiring a sales/deployment engineer who will help the Keyhole technology to be adopted by large commercial and government customers.
Some of the more interesting requirements: “Knowledge of GIS technologies is desired including common data formats and applications (ESRI, MapInfo, Oracle Spatial, etc.) is desired” and “Hands-on Linux experience is a must ” and finally “5+ years experience as a […] systems engineering in a UNIX/Linux environment.”
So there does seem to be a will to compete on the high end, but is it possible (and I’m asking because I don’t know) that Google might deliberately choose to provide its enterprise products on a Linux platform while other mainstream GIS vendors like ESRI do Windows? Would that make sense, GIS pros? After all, IBM et al are pushing Linux, so why not run your your GIS on Linux at the enterprise level…
Journalism students at the University of Kansas have a Q&A with John Hanke, in charge of Google Earth. Some interesting stuff there regarding Google Earth’s ambitions:
Question: Do you have plans to add more analytical capabilities to google earth in the future?
Answer: In the traditional GIS sense of analytics, we don’t have any plans. We are more of a spatial thumb-tack wall where you can pin notes and work with information on top of geography. We want to make it easy to share that type of information. We aren’t like ESRI or MAPINFO in the traditional GIS sense. Those companies do a good job at what they do.
Yep, Google Earth as a geobrowser. The entire Q&A is worth reading.
