Directions Magazine’s All Points Blog notes that Google has a new data API in a closed beta test. There aren’t a lot of details except what Adena notes in her blog entry. It will be a web API for reading and writing spatial data. Like the other Google API’s we can probably expect it to support:
- Storage
- Points, lines and polygons
- Attributes
- Indexable
- Searchable
- Client libraries in Java, C#, PHP, etc.
Of course, Google doesn’t announce anything until it’s released, but supposedly we can expect something in the next month. How is this relevant to Azavea? We will likely take a look at this as soon as it’s released and consider it as a low cost way to store and retrieve our growing library of polygon data used by our Cicero API. A lot will depend, however, on the specific features of the Google Maps Data API as well as license terms and performance.
UPDATE 4/19/2009: Google has released the new API at Where 2.0 this week. Querying the data looks like it’s limited to a feature ID, so we couldn’t use this for any spatial queries yet, but as a spatially enabled data repository, it looks very promising. And if Google adds some basic spatial query capabilities, it will be a compelling environment for hosting basic vector mapping capabilities.
Safe Software announced that it is adding support for OpenStreetMap format data to their FME product line. Safe Software makes the leading spatial ETL (extract, transform and load) software on the market. It’s also the toolkit upon which the ESRI Data Interoperability extensions are based. It’s exciting to see that Safe will support reading OSM-formatted data. This will make it a lot easier to use the planet file to generate new data sets. We recently had a need for a higher resolution country boundary layer than we could get from many of the default sources. The OSM country boundaries would be ideal, but it’s not necessarily straightforward to extract just that bit and convert it to a shapefile. Something like FME would make that a lot easier.
Along those same lines, I’d love to see more support for the OpenStreetMap API in other commercial software as well. While JOSM, Merkaartor and Potlatch are all adequate ways to edit the OSM database, they don’t have many of the editing features of ArcMap. I’d do more OSM editing if ArcMap supported it as a data source.
It would also be cool to be able to use the OSM basemap as an ArcGIS Online cached map set. The OSM servers themselves aren’t stable enough (in my experience) to support production applications, but with ESRI adding several new base map source including third party data from Microsoft Virtual Earth and Delorme, I think this would be a good data set that wouldn’t cost much to add and would give a nice basemap that, in many parts of the world, is superior to what TeleAtlas and Navteq can offer.
OpenStreetMap for U-Penn Campus
