Spaced Out ::

During one of the lunch sessions at DMT the question of using Google Earth to make geological data easily viewable and more accessible was raised. Harvey Thorleifson (many thanks for the heads up on this!) of the Minnesota Geological Survey organised a group meeting with the Google people to discuss just this. And they did actually go to Google headquarters and chat through possibilities. And the short and long of it is you can transparently drape point, line and polygon layers over the top of the surface much as with any other data set. What you CANNOT do is (and I quote from Harvey):

1. You can not query polygons
2. You can not place content below the earth surface image
3. You can not place content below earth surface elevation

Apparantly streaming speed is what drives web site visits and therefore revenue, so anything that hits this, without good reason, is not allowed. Whilst the latter two are largely restricted to geological/earth science phenomena and so possibly of limited scope, the first item is immensely important to just about every application area (if you link to JoMs RSS feed you will see that you can click on maps presented as points, but not as polygons). Will Google revisit this? Well the answer was possibly, with the BIG driver being real estate. This is one application area with enough users, and therefore potential revenue, to force a change from the current situation.