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A world of many globes

This is something I have been waiting to see since the Google Earth API was introduced a few years ago. The Earth Knowledge Virtual Globe is a project which is creating an application with a selection of data layers as an alternative to the layers offered by default in the Google Earth client. All the building blocks have been available for a while, alongside the Google Earth viewing api there is KML , an industry standard way of encoding and displaying geocoded data that can be authored and served by any organisation regardless of its size.

For Google it’s a real challenge trying to identify which of the approximately 2 billion KML files out there to include by default in the Google Earth Application, sites like the Earth Knowledge globe offer a partial solution allowing the development of thematic globes or globes publishing a single organisations data. Key of course to this scaling and providing universal access to this information is of course search, something we have dear to our hearts…

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

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