Another patent via Gary Price, this time from Google:

Markup Language for Interactive Geographic Information System (filed June 12, 2007)

"Data-driven guarded evaluation of conditional-data associated with data objects is used to control activation and processing of the data objects in an interactive geographic information system. Methods of evaluating conditional-data to control activation of the data objects are disclosed herein. Data-structures to specify conditional data are also disclosed herein."

I don't really get this - but I think it's about giving the user more control of the display of large data sets. Perhaps readers can help me out?

Gary Price at Ask/Resource Shelf sent on this one:

Geographical Location Extraction (filed July 3, 2007)

"A geographical location extraction method and tool to infer a likely geographical location from one or more search terms entered as a query by a user on a search engine or the like."

From a quick look it seems to be a process of examining words to determine how likely it is they are geographic and intended as part of a geographic search. I supposed it's yet another way to try to determine location or location of interest, this time without GPS or Wi-FI or TV but using just words.

The two fellows behind the patent have worked on Book Search, StreetView and semantic tagging for YouTube videos and the sense is that the patent will allow text searching in those StreetView images as well as in videos. The application filed with World Intellectual Property Organization is here.

Google notes that it files patents all the time and only some turn into products and warns that we should not jumpt to conclusions about new products. That said, the patent app describes how such a tool might be used to advertise a McDonalds or provide a tour (with detailed information) about grocery store shelves.

InformationWeek