What is special about Geospatial?

Will it be the next step in HCI after multi-touch?

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

I’ve found this great video on Google Earth Blog. The application was developed with Apple’s iPhone SDK.

Is this the way we will interact with geospatial data in near future?

[via Google Earth Blog]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

Google had given away new presents at the Open Source Developer Conference in Taiwan. Last weekend the participants got paper notebooks with the title “Google Earth”. If you toggle this block, the photo on the cover is changing - from the whole earth to Googleplex. There are some intemediate steps which should represent the zoom levels simmilar to Google Earth. There are 5 or 6 zoom levels while toggling.

[via GWB]

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Google Earth 4.3 is an incremental update with new features and some pretty cool new data as well. This is NOT a major new version, however, there are some significant new features.

• There are new day/night lighting effects. You can turn on a real-time sunlight which shines on the new atmospheric lighting Google has added. The new sun icon in the upper middle (next to the new Sky button) will enable this function. Once it loads, you will see the current position of the sun. With the time slider you can change the sun over the course of a whole day so you can see the sun from sunrise to sunrise. Note that the lighting effects the atmosphere, so you actually get color changes near the horizon, and on clouds (if you turn on the Weather->Clouds layer).
• Now also Street Views (normally you see gold camera icons) are included in Google Earth. You click on a sphere and you enter inside and can look around (or double-click a camera icon). You can then double-click on camera icons to be flown to other views (from within the sphere). This is done through the GE Photo Viewer interface, and works pretty well. Turn on the Street View layer to see the icons, and then fly to a city with the icons to see them up close.

[via GoogleEarth Blog]

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KML was an defacto-Standard for visualization of geospatial data over the Internet. Now it’s an official standard, approved by the OGC.

Here the official announcement of the OGC:

Wayland, Mass., April 14, 2008 - The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) today announced the approval of the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML), marking KML’s transition into an open standard which will be maintained by the OGC. Developers will now have a standard approach for using KML to code and share visual geographic content in existing or future web-based online maps and 3D geospatial browsers like Google Earth^TM.

“We are pleased to see the adoption of KML as an OGC standard,” said Ron Lake, chairman and chief executive officer of Galdos Systems Inc. “We believe that this is a major step forward for the OGC and for the entire geographic information community, as it provides the first broadly accepted standard for the visualization of geographic information.”

“Geographic data adds tremendous value to the online experience. More and more people are looking for ways to incorporate location information into their online content,” said Michael Weiss-Malik, KML product manager for Google. “The standardization of KML makes it possible for both novice and expert users alike to publish and share geographical information in an open format. It’s not unlike web browsers’ standardized support for HTML, which allows any web browser to read any web page.”

KML version 2.2 was brought into the OGC consensus process by a submission team led by Google and Galdos Systems Inc.

KML is an XML-based programming language, originally developed to manage the display of geospatial data in Google Earth. It’s still used heavily in Google Earth but is also supported by a variety of vendors’ tools and mapping websites.

The OpenGIS KML 2.2 Encoding Standard formalizes the KML 2.2 model and language while remaining backwards compatible with existing KML 2.2 files and tools. In comparison with the Google^TM KML 2.2 Reference, the standard defines:

• the KML 2.2 geometry encoding and interpolation model
• an extension model in support of application profiles
• conformance requirements and test cases

The adopted OpenGIS KML 2.2 Encoding Standard (OGC KML) is available at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/kml/.

About the OGC

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 345 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

Google and Google Earth are trademarks of Google Inc.

[via OGC]

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Nearly everyone knows about Google Maps API but less people know that there is also a Google Earth COM API. The Google Earth COM API allows third party applications to query information from and send commands to Google Earth. Through IApplicationGE, applications can query the current viewport, control the 3D viewpoint, use KML features, and more.

The file earth.idl is the original IDL for COM interface and documentation. There exists also wrapper for programming languages like C# or Java. This allows to use basic methods straigt forward.

I think the Google Earth COM API (which is currently in beta) is not promoted intensively by Google because most things should be done by KML itself.

[via http://earth.google.com/comapi]

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Any discussion about the present and future of the GIS industry is incomplete without perspective from the man some call the “Father of GIS,” Jack Dangermond. He and his wife, Laura, founded industry heavyweight ESRI in 1969.

As interest in GIS grows and its applications are more frequently marketed to the general public, ESRI and its professional GIS tools may be approaching a crossroad. Below there is a small interview about the Future of GIS:

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