Intersection of the GeoWeb and GIS - Google and ESRI Partnership

Intersection of the GeoWeb and GIS - Google and ESRI Partnership

May 13th, 2008by Sean Gorman

The morning session of Where 2.0 was very interesting. I had a great speaking slot right after Nokia and right before Google. We launched GeoCommons Finder! and made it through the demo even with a bit of a slow connection. You can join the demo at http://finder.geocommons.com and if you would like a entry key drop me an email at sean@fortiusone.com and I’ll pass one along.

We spent a good bit of time talking about making big geodata sets available in the web browser and having the content available for GIS and GeoWeb users - even spreadsheet jockeys. This is a horn we’ve been blowing for a while, and the great thing about the morning session was the Google presentation following us. Their presentation had a small surprise with Jack Dangermond joining them on stage talking about the interconnection of Google Earth/Maps and ESRI. John Hanke had a nice set up talking about the dark web of GIS data that needs to be exposed to the GeoWeb and how they are working with ESRI to do it.

It’s great to see the big guys on the GeoWeb and GIS respectively working together to bring more data to the masses. While there was a nice canned demo showing ArcGIS 9.3 interacting with Google Earth, it will be interesting to see how it works in the wild and how it scales. My one concern is that is seemed from the demo that the model is still based around the public being passive viewers of GIS professionals work. We can see the output but can we access the data and add our own nuances and perspective to it. Have to wait and see it actually rolls out, but I think democratizing both the data and ability to answer questions with it are still necessary steps for great progress to reach its potential.