Michael T. Jones

Google's Geospatial Organizing Principle

This article reviews the motivations, approaches, and accomplishments in applying genus loci - the sense of place - to advance Googles mission to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. Delivering information in a meaningful spatial context has proven an ambitious undertaking. Ideas from philosophy, psychology, and sociology shaped the design, and technical and logistical challenges abounded in the implementation. For this project, the Google geospatial team wove long-standing wisdom, fresh technical thinking, and their vision of the future to create a global information landscape where people experience a uniquely real understanding of the answers to their questions. That the work is used millions of times per hour shows the result to be useful.

The big-O of global visualization: challenges in scaling GIS to one billion users

Google Earth is a geographically-contextual data exploration client using streamed 3D data and 2D imagery, presently serving more than 250 million unique users. Google Maps is a web browser based, streamed 2D imagery client with an even larger user base. As their combined user base grows toward one billion users, the underlying implementations big-O algorithmic complexities suggest areas for continued research and innovation in a variety of areas. These research areas are highlighted and promising approaches are reviewed.