Google for Geodata
14th Apr 2006, 13:17 GMT
By nat Right now this is for the hardcore GIS user, but MapDex points the way to what a truly spatially-aware Google might look like. You can search thousands of public data servers for geodata. As it said when I wrote this entry, "A global Index of 2,018 servers, serving 37,168 map services, containing over 400,000 GIS Layers, covering more than 4,000,000 columns". That's a whole lot of data, but just a fraction of the data that's kept in GIS systems around the world. Already we're beginning to see the metadata problem: only a fraction of those 400,000 layers have meaningful names. Most of the location data has the equivalent of variables called thing1, thing2, thing3, etc. So there are problems, but it's good to see the geospatial industry taking its first steps towards Where 2.0, with the Internet connecting everything. Tim likes to say we're building the Internet Operating System, but I also like to think of it as the Internet GIS. This search index is the first step to this, and it's a delight to see that you can export layers to Google Earth.
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