Monday, June 11. 2007

Coming Soon in Google Earth: Books

Yes, that's right, books are coming to Google Earth. Michael Jones offered up a preview at the New York State Geospatial Summit. Recall that Google has scanned in text of many out of copyright (and other) books and done character recognition to create text. Now, the company has taken it one step further and posted locations found in someo of those texts (the demo showed only publicly available ones if I recall correctly) to Google Earth. When you click on a placemark you jump to the book's page and to the exact page on which the location information was found. And you get a Google Map of all the places mentioned in the book.

Back on Google Earth, there's a timeline slider so that you can see books "pop up" as you move through time. And, if many books cite the same location (Chicago, say), Google Earth cleverly arranges a subset in an orderly circle around the city to avoid clutter.

I was jazzed to see this coming attaction in part because I'd shown off both Google Map View and Timeline earlier in the day. I'd suggested they are likely indicators of where things are going!

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This is probably leveraging technology from Metacarta, a spinout from MIT Labs.

#1 Blair Swedeen (Link) on 2007-06-13 11:02 (Reply)

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