Jeremy Cothran, sensor web innovator, has been hard at work making it easier for ocean data platform operators to georeference their online data in Google Earth. He’s managed to automate the process by turning it into a free HTTP web service. Jeremy Explains:

I’ve put together a google based visualization tool for a basic observation catalog visualization via kml/google earth. Folks can either download and modify the base scripts or use it as an http service which when supplied a basic CSV file and observation types list produces a KML file. More technical details are listed here. [Just cancel out of the password request, twice.]

Might be useful for encouraging/engaging other observation systems to list their assets via KML. We are struggling as a community to provide some consistent metadata (xml schemas, controlled vocabularies/codelists, web services) across our organizations and I’m hoping KML and its easy visualizations can help provide some incentive (a carrot) towards this.

Here is a sample by Jeremy of his web service (hover over the link to see its guts), made from two referenced content files. Very smooth indeed. And so is this: That exact same link can be pasted into Google Maps to produce a Maps version of the KML. I’m still amazed Google Maps can do that. It doesn’t get much easier than this:-)