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.
