Google officially announced the Google Maps Data API Wednesday. This was hinted at some months ago;I covered it here. In short,it’s an API to geodata that’s hosted by Google. The main “things you can do”with the data:add feature (point,line,poly) and attributes,delete them and read the data. Google and some of its partners already are using it;some examples are on the page noted above. The Google Geo Dev blog post (with much of the same info) is here.
Sean Gilles rounds up thoughts from geobloggers on the announcement here. If you read it,you may need to know what CRUD is. It’s “Create,read,update and delete (CRUD) are the four basic functions of persistent storage ,a major part of nearly all computer software.”per Wikipedia.
Strangely,even as this announcement was going on in California,I was presenting at the New York State Geospatial Summit (look for a complete write up soon). One of my three “trends to watch”:data as a service. Nice to see my thoughts validated by Google. And,no I didn’t mention this API or use it as an example. In retrospect,I should have!
The use cases presented seem “small time”rather than enterprise scale (which doesn’t mean hey can’t be):travel data,best restaurants (“a collection”in Virtual Earth)…that sort of thing. Would Dr. Niman have used it to store H1N1 data? Would USGS put its earthquake data there? I’m thinking it might be used for the sort of data currently shared via network link (KML) or GeoRSS or the like. On the other hand,Google does say it scales. Could this be one option to look at in addition to storing/serving your geodata (ideally your authoritative data) via ArcGIS Online? That latter has/will have a solid set of geospatial tools to use. I suspect the former will in time,too,whether Google or others build them.