Are We Seeing the Emergence of Online Geospatial Processing? | Jul 02nd 2007
It has been about a month since the announcement of Google Map Mapplets and within the past week two mapplets have caught my eye. The terrain profiler and the sea level rise mapplets from the HeyWhatsThat? folks. The whole concept has has piqued my thoughts that we’re starting to see the development of online geospatial processing outside of the traditional GIS body.
There’s ESRI’s ArcGIS Server, which is for the enterprise. There is MapServer, GeoServer, GraphServer, etc from open source. But these are for dedicated GIS teams for clients who have the resources to maintain them. So, does GMapplets enable the public in a way to build their own processes for specific issues and move online geospatial processing away from the enterprise to the home?
I think it may.
I don’t think that it will cut into the enterprise solutions, open or proprietary, but will probably bring greater awareness to issues that folks care about. There’s crime, there’s public resources, there are environmental issues people are interested in that could bring greater geographic awareness to communities. There are about 276 mapplets in Google’s gallery. They range from Wikipedia, a GeoRSS reader, webcam locator, transporation surfaces, area calculators, and user generated content. As early as it is, I think we’re going to see a lot more development in this area to start complementing information generated and shared via collaborative atlases.
The other thing I wanted to note are some of the questions that everyone seems to ask at some point, “When will Google jump into GIS?” Well, I don’t think they have to. All they have to do is enable bright people with the right platforms. Then I think they’ll be eating someone’s lunch.
Right now, SOA is white hot for geospatial apps, but the question is going to be how well do things scale, and what happens when your particular services of interest are down?
Comment by Dave Smith — July 2, 2007 @ 3:48 pm
Does sharing equal qualified content? I think this is a big question for the millions of geospatial professionals that make a living at mapping.
Google’s business is to sell advertising. However this is not necessarily the business of creating geospatial information. While these two businesses are not mutually exclusive, I suspect that those developing maps for a living may need a different mechanism to participate in the growing online experience.
Comment by Paul Bissett — July 2, 2007 @ 9:17 pm
This is starting to sound like the NGA Earth guys. Well, it’s just for visualization. Yea, but at what point does it have to contain a certain accuracy to have the right visualization? Map geeks understand the earth reference model stuff. But, try to explain to the non-map geeks. I agree with Paul. Where’s the imaginative web enabling map geeks? I know they’re out there.
Comment by ucsblzygrl — July 3, 2007 @ 1:31 pm
Google are interested in indexing information/data, especially vertical data such geo/lbs information. Serious geoprocess takes dedicated computing power and complex process composing platform. I agree that Google won’t just jump into GIS to help users that much on process data, rather, they will try their best to lure and host users’ data, and index them. Having said, once the Google OS release (if ever), someone else might want tackle the GIS side of Google map/earth business.
Comment by Flex RIA — July 5, 2007 @ 4:49 pm