A new patent app from Google was made public last week called "Ranking and Clustering of Geo-Located Objects." Says ZDnet's Saw: It "appears to describe a method in which geographical location objects of the type seen in Google Earth and Google Maps would be more efficiently classified in a database."

He goes on to quote the document which states that, as I understand it, geographic data is tough to store. Thus, writes Google, "This document describes systems and methods for storing and accessing geo-located content, such as 3D content to be displayed on a model of the earth. The content is stored in a multi-level hierarchical index having embedded therein information about descendants at each level of the index."

I'll turn to our tech/database readers. Is this a new better way to store data? Is it something just Google will use (it seems to be for large datasets) or is it for the rest of us, too? Os this is set of tools that could be implemented in a variety of databases?

via ZDnet Blog of Russel Shaw

No, CityGML is not scary! But the fellow who authored it is coming to Cambridge and it's a public lecture.

Details:

CityGML, A Shared Vocabulary for Representing Cites in Three Dimensions
Presented by Thomas Kolbe, Professor at the Technical University of Berlin
Wednesday, October 31st 6:00 PM
Harvard Graduate School of Design; Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium
Map of GSD and Harvard Square: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/findus