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.