Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Today Google will release a new version of Google Earth that allows Internet users to view the skies as seen from Earth. This new service called Sky allow users to fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

The Sky imagery was stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.

Google said that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.

Spotted on the New York Times and Olge Earth.

In response to my previous post, a reader wrote me an email:

We saw your new entry on data integration for GIS and are not quite sure what you mean. For the most part, coordinate systems can be translated one to another. I’ve been told that is not a problem. So, I wonder what you mean.

It was my fault that I didn’t explain the problem well. It’s true that there are mathematical formulas for coordinate transformation. Software programs and API have been developed for this purpose (e.g., geotools). In my previous post, I wasn’t concerned about whether coordinates can be or can’t be transformed into different CRS but the ability for web applications to explicitly describe CRS and the data integration process that is associated with CRS transformation.

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In geospatial information systems (GIS), data integration is often a problem. Different systems may use different vocabularies to represent the same abstract concept, and different systems may express data values in different unit of measure (UOM). This problem may be of interest to the Semantic Web community because it’s a different kind of semantic interoperability problem.

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