Who says Google doesn’t care about standards? When playing around with the RSS feed from Picasa Web Albums, I was pleasantly surprised to see full-blown GeoRSS GML for the geo-located items. In fact, they are recording both an Envelope and a Point for the photo. I don’t know where the Envelope comes from, because the UI only allows you to specify a point, but oh well.

<georss:where>
   <gml:Envelope>
      <gml:lowerCorner>42.4857087 -71.2902409</gml:lowerCorner>
      <gml:upperCorner>42.4984298 -71.265822</gml:upperCorner>
   </gml:Envelope>
   <gml:Point>
      <gml:pos>42.4920693 -71.2780315</gml:pos>
   </gml:Point>
</georss:where>

Now I’d just like to know why they are using RSS 2.0 with little bits of Atom sprinkled here and there…

Love to see companies embrace better data sharing:

One of the things we’re pretty concerned about around here is something called data liberation. Too often, your stuff’s locked inside proprietary file formats that force you to use whatever tool you used to create it. We don’t think that’s right, so we’re doing what we can to make it easier to move your data around.

COLLADA is a 3D file format based on open standards; it makes it easier to move your models between different pieces of software. KMZ is the standard file format for packaging 3D models together with information about their geographic locations. SketchUp 7.1 can import and export COLLADA and KMZ files

http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2009/09/sketchup-71-is-here.html

There’s a big societal worry, in general, about the safety and privacy of personal information in the Internet age. In some cases, like banking and medical records, that worry is well-founded. But for the most part, people should just act like they and their data are in public, and exposed. That should usually be OK, because the benefits outweigh the costs, or as Tom Yager recently put it:

You can’t live in a cloud and expect the safety and isolation of an underground bunker. Information that I care to keep secret travels by Federal Express or is accompanied by a handshake. I take for granted that my electronic correspondence, including phone calls, is up for grabs, so the sum of my nonsecrets is not that interesting.

Bjørn Sandvik does a great job explaining why the usual ways of projecting KML data don’t work well for world maps. For example, often “Greenland looks like the same size of South America, while it is actually 8 times smaller.” Specifying coordinate reference systems (CRS) in KML was one issue OGC struggles with when considering new features for KML. Do you think one should be able to at least “hint” at what CRS should be used for a particular KML file?

KML projections [From KML projections]

Google announced a data API for Maps this morning in San Jose. This is basically a CRUD service for storing geodata in “the cloud” that leverages Atom in lots of ways. That didn’t sound very world-shaking to me at first since there aren’t even any basic spatial query functions, but there are some ways in which this could be a game-changing service — if you trust Google to be your data custodian.

1. you’re freed from figuring out how to store your data
2. web and phone data creation APIs come free
3. base maps come free too

I’ve felt something like this has been needed for a long time. In my past life doing GIS for urban planning a lot of great initiatives got bogged down by the complexities of how and where to store data and who would administer it after the MIT “techies” left. Hopefully this kind of service gets us over that hurdle.

It will be very interesting to see the uptake of this.