Where [2.0]…are the KML files?
Last month saw the annual event that is [Where 2.0], a conference hosted by O’Reilly in San Francisco. Over the past couple of years it’s been somewhat of a landmark event in the geospatial calendar, often playing host to a raft of new and exciting location aware technology…Woodstock for Neogeography?
I’ve never managed to attend the conference, but always made a conscious effort to follow online; this year it felt different, no headline announcements or cool new products, and very little chatter.
One announcement that did grab my attention was made by John Hanke from Google during the ESRI\Google keynote (you can watch the keynote here). Hanke remarks that Google have provided access, via their search API’s, to the Google ‘GeoIndex’ – an index of results returned by Google robots as they crawl the web for geospatial content. On the surface, this is significant news, but it seems to have received only little comment.
Hanke suggests the Google search API’s will provide access to the “content, attribution, linkbacks and the urls” that make the geoweb…but where are the underlying resources, where are the KML files?
Barry Hunter has knocked up a useful php script that queries the GeoIndex and nicely formats the JSON response. Try it out and you’ll notice you get a handful of Google Maps url’s, but no links to the underlying resources? Hopefully, there is more to come; providing access to the GeoIndex, and the underlying content files, really would move the ‘geoweb’ forward.
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barry Hunter
> Try it out and you’ll notice you get a handful of Google Maps url’s, but no links to the underlying resources?
Bit down the line to this, but please star this suggestion:
http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=107
(For another purpose realised would need the KML url, and then rememebered seeing this blog post)
Sep 12th, 2008
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