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Short news: WWGML on hold; Hudson-Smith interview; Walrusses; ESRI does GeoRSS

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  • One more thing (The Earth is Square): “WWGML markup language is on hold for now till the KML support in World Wind is complete.”

    I think that is a wise move. Any attempt to break out with yet another strain of geographic markup language is unlikely to succeed right now. (It will be very interesting to see how Microsoft tackles the “problem” of a de facto standard that they don’t “own”.) I do wish one of the NASA World Wind bloggers would go into some more detail about the extent to which KML will be supported in the near future. Network links? Icon data? KML 2.1? Collada textures? I’m curious, because several scientists have asked me in recent days about what subset of KML tags they should use if they want to make their files viewable “universally”. I don’t expect to find out about ESRI ArcGIS explorer’s KML support any time soon, but perhaps NASA World Wind’s developers can oblige us?

    [UPDATE 2006-08-04: They can. Thanks!]

  • Londonist interviews Andrew Hudson-Smith, author of Digitally Distributed Environments. it’s a great read, and it contains this gem:

    When we boot up Google Earth, it’s annoying to find that cities like New York are already included in 3-D, but London isn’t. You have to download individual buildings drawn by skilled amateurs. Why is that?

    We have talked with Google and if we can sort out the licensing, as I mentioned above, the Virtual London model would come with Google Earth and you wouldn’t have to download models from various websites or blogs, including our own.

  • Animals in Google Earth are generally a Good Thing. It turns out the Erik Born’s walrus data referred to in the Spiegel article from earlier this week is actually publicly available — in fact, it was turned into KML by polar KML guru Leif Toudal. The website is only in Danish, but the walrus data is included in the KMZ file for Greenland’s western basin. (There is also a file for the Eastern Basin.) Alas, the transmitters are no longer active, so the data is no longer live, but there is a good chance of renewed live data soon.
  • ESRI does GeoRSS. To be more specific, its ArcWeb Services JavaScript API, out of beta today, can parse GeoRSS feeds. (Via GeoRSS Blog).

2 thoughts on “Short news: WWGML on hold; Hudson-Smith interview; Walrusses; ESRI does GeoRSS”

  1. (It will be very interesting to see how Microsoft tackles the “problem” of a de facto standard that they don’t “own”.)

    Probably the same way they attempted to hijack HTML, with the “embrace, extend, and devour” strategy. But their apparent inability to get a satisfactory new OS out the door and the fact that this time they’re up against another marketplace Goliath now – Google – it appears that Microsoft is fading.

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