Sunday, October 28. 2007

Patent Watch: Google Patent for Ranking/Clustering Geo Info

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

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It'll be more interesting to see the contests on that one, I think. Come out from the shadows shall they.

#1 Daniel (Link) on 2007-10-29 05:46 (Reply)

Paul Ramsey looked into it here: http://geotips.blogspot.com/2007/10/silly-patents.html He used the term "silly."

#2 Adena Schutzberg (Link) on 2007-10-29 14:58 (Reply)

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