Categories
Google Earth Google Maps INSPIRE web 2.0

Google search extended to KML – Wake up everybody

It’s been a couple of weeks now since Google announced that its main search engine is now able to search and parse KML files, the native file format for Google Earth. This was widely reported in the blogosphere but with little comment, I’m not sure most mainstream GIS users are even aware of the news..

They should be !!

It might not seem a big deal, after-all KML is a “Google” format, and you would expect it to be searchable in the same way that a pdf document is for example. But.. and its a big but, the Google search engine is parsing and understanding the geographical data within the KML and returning relevant results geographically in additional to all the every clever page rank stuff.

KML Google search

So if I chose to publish the KML file of my evening walk around Teddington on my web-site.., The Google spiders would find it and parse the content noting from the description tags that it is about teddington, but would also get the extents of the GPS track from the linestring co-ordinates.

Now anybody searching for content on Teddington would find the file and its content either from the term teddington, or if using Google Earth from it’s actual location encoded as geographic co-ordinates.

Ok now move beyond a simple walking track to a KML with a linked shapefile, or network link to an enterprise spatial database of agricultural information. The mechanism described would search and find this content just as well !

As Michael Jones points out in the excellent Directions interview, Google Earth and I guess potentially tools that understand KML like ArcGIS Explorer become browsers of Geographic content in the same way Firefox or Safari are browsers of document based content.

What does these mean for the GI industry – I think this is really important !!

To develop infrastructures of Geographic information (SDI’s) we are doing the “right thing” working hard on metadata standards, and discovery portals but it is taking a long time and may need a revolution in semantic techniques to actually work using even quite broad controlled vocabularies of terms.

But hang on… the rest of the web did not wait to develop metadata standards for page content, instead it could be argued they took the “dirty” route and chucked massive computing power and very clever search algorithms to solve the problem with great success – To Google is now mainstream language.

With INSPIRE now real, it’s interesting to think, is the solution to a practical and cheap to implement SDI, publishing KML files and a simple search box ?

Wake up everybody !!!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

4 replies on “Google search extended to KML – Wake up everybody”

Ed, if you really want to wake people up and get folks thinking about this, you should link to what blog discussion there is. You don’t have to link to me necessarily, but you could link to Paul Ramsey’s or Allan Doyle’s entries and then the importance of KML search starts to become a bit of a meme. Think in terms of that Web 2.0 video, teaching the machine and all that jazz.

Hi Sean,

Yes you are right of course…

I was aware of Paul, Allans and your own postings on the subjects.

Between all of these postings there are about 10 comments, not exactly the iPhone is it, but I guess my real concern is that the more mainstream GIS users are not really aware of this – clearly Directions are doing their bit now which is great to see.

Lets seen if we can get a meme going..

[…] Posted by cholmes on May 13th, 2007 So I’ve been slow on the uptake, as the geo blogosphere’s conversation about Google’s KML Search‘ took place awhile ago. Mostly because I’m only about half way through my meandering series of essays to make several points, one of which is that SDIs are crap, and that once there’s enough geospatial information of real value out there then a company will come along and let us search it. Well, reality has caught up with me as I’ve lost any kind of consistency with blog posts. […]

Add a comment?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.