This session at Google I/O demonstrated how developers can take advantage of new and little known GIS capabilities in all of our geo services.
We started out showing some of the GIS capabilities in Google Maps API, which amongst other features, lets you calculate distances and angles and overlay map tiles in arbitrary projections.
Moving onto some new and upcoming products, we showed off some of the capabilities of Google Earth Builder, a new platform to manage and publish large amounts of raster and vector GIS data.
In the world of data visualization, previous sessions had showed off new styling features for Fusion Tables. In this session, we showed how you can enable spatial queries on your data, displaying maps and statistics for the closest set of features to a location, or all features within an arbitrary radius.
Google Earth Builder is not the only new product that provides access to our infrastructure for working with large GIS datasets - we also talked about Google Earth Engine. This Google.org project is designed to help scientists easily access massive archives of satellite imagery, and run image analysis and other algorithms on the data within Google’s datacenters. Complex analyses that might take months or years to run on a single machine can now be completed in hours or minutes.
Finally, we showed off some ways you can integrate open source technology, and finished off the session with Brian Flood from Arc2Earth, who demonstrated a great example of the kind of GIS services that developers can build using Google’s Geo API’s.
Check out the video to see for yourself, and thanks for reading our Geo API’s Summer Learning Series.
Posted by Josh Livni, Geo Developer Relations Team
The Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an open standard for geographic data presentation. There are over one billion KML files on the web, and yet the vast majority of these files are points on a map.
In High Performance KML for Maps and Earth, Sean Askay and I covered advanced techniques for using KML in Google Earth and the Earth API, as well as introduced other Google platforms that support KML. Our hope is that developers will discover the power of using KML on Google’s platform.
Some of the topics we discussed during our talk:
An Introduction to KML
Advanced data visualization techniques
We demonstrated two new animation techniques using under-utilized KML tags that make for powerful data visualizations.
First we showed a time-animated thematic map of U.S. Census data using the <gx:altitudeOffset> and <gx:AnimatedUpdate> tags to animate the data using a KML Tour. See this post on unchartable.com more information.
We also demonstrated also a proof of concept for pushing near real-time GPS data updates to Google Earth via a <NetworkLink> that uses <NetworkLinkControl> and <Update> tags to inject new location data into a pre-existing GPS track <gx:MultiTrack>.
You can download this KML file to see these two techniques in action and the other KMLs demonstrated during the talk.
Developer environment
People often ask us about a developer environment for creating KML, so we covered various options. We looked at editors, validators, and libraries, including the open source library PyKML.
KML on other platforms
We showed how to use KML in the Google Maps API and Google Fusion Tables.
So check out the slides and the video and start bringing the power of KML to your presentations.
Give us feedback in our Product Forums.
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