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Links: Google Earth patent, Outreach showcase, Dagik

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  • Google Earth patent: ZDNet’s Russell Shaw unearths (ha) a recently published patent application by Google that details how Google Earth does what it does, particularly over on the server side. The application was filed April 25, 2006, and published Dec 6, 2007. I eagerly await Avi Bar-Zeev’s exposition of What It All Means.
  • Outreach showcase: Google Earth Outreach gets its own showcase. (Via Google Lat Long blog)
  • Daily geospace data as KML: Kyoto University’s Dagik. Wow. Quite a resource.
  • GIS for development: Over at Global Knowledge 3 I ran into the Canadian developers of the ICT4D Atlas, an open-source map-and-database tool that lets you add georeferenced information (at the country and city level) and then perform basic analysis on it. The idea is to develop this into a fully fledged tool to help development projects. It’s a work in progress, but worth mentioning here in case others in this space might want to collaborate. (The developers are active on PPGIS.net, a mailing list for participatory GIS technologies that I was not previously aware of.)
  • AGU: Google Earth Blog‘s Frank is covering AGU’s fall meeting.

2 thoughts on “Links: Google Earth patent, Outreach showcase, Dagik”

  1. I wish I had time, Stefan. Basic summary from a very casual skimming: they’re apparently asking to patent KML as it pertains to augmenting and searching the whole earth database.

    I might speculate that this would make companies who may be contemplating adopting KML (at least in a client/server context) inquire about Google’s plans for licensing and enforcing this potential patent. KML as a stand-alone file format might be safe enough, assuming no other patents, but KML served remotely following a spatial request would be worrisome, given the claims. In fact, anything served this way might cause me concern, if I was still in this business.

  2. this can be well understood, currently all the research and development of google is either copied by yahoo or microsoft. So I am not overwhelmed by this fact.

    interesting post though!

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