Month: May 2011

Last week I attended and spoke at the annual EMEA Google Faculty Summit at the Google offices in Zurich. The event brings together researchers and academic staff for a few days to present their work, talk to Google Engineers and for Google and academia to work together to developer common research interests. Most of the academics present were from a Computer Science departments, some specialising in privacy and policy as well as those interested in software engineering and natural language processing a subject core to Google’s success.

Also core to Google’s success is the exploitation of geospatial technology, yet there were no academics from the GIS community present.

Perhaps this is due to the focus on computer science, but  then I have always believed that GIS needs to become closer to CS as the use of geospatial technology becomes more mainstream.

There is I think a need for a debate as to where  the focus on GIS research and as a result GIS teaching is directed. Clearly there is a value in training people to apply GIS to applications in other fields of study, but where does the fundamental research geospatial technology take place ? And related to this point, to what extent does the GIS community interact with the broader Computer Science discipline ?

So if you are part of the academic geospatial community, take a look at the Google University resources here, perhaps you can make the event next year ?

Written and submitted from the Geospatial Middle East Conference 2011, Abu Dhabi (24.41N, 54.48w)

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)