As mentioned on the Google Geo Blog yesterday, as well as by James Fee in his blog, Google’s spatial offerings (Google Maps and soon Google Earth I assume) will include comprehensive parcel data that has been collected somehow from Google. While the Geo Blog entry is sparse, there is a mention of the “Report a Problem” link added to maps, allowing users to make suggestions (and perhaps corrections) to the data served by Google. What many people have noted is that the copyright notice in the United States has changed, and now the notice reports as a copyright holder Google.
Google Street View Car in Chinatown, Toronto, courtesy of Wikipedia
There is a lot of speculation about the data, including where Google may have procured the data. There are some simple answers for this, as well as many unanswered issues remaining. To tackle it first, there is one great source for road data for Google, and that is their Google Street View Vans/Cars. Those cars are equipped with a good enough GPS to enable the correct georeferencing of all the images taken. Those coordinates, bundled with some OCR scanning Google can do to find street names and the laser range scanners to identify width of road can ultimately assist Google in creating a dataset that may be even more automated than the traditional TeleAtlas methods.
Of course, information like parcels is not easy to achieve using such a method. As James Fee speculated, this can perhaps come from local governments and institutions, but there are multiple problems there as well. Oftentimes these organizations offer their data free online for non-commercial usage. Is Google Maps and Earth commercial if they bring in revenue? Most often. the data require some sort of monetary transfer between a user and the organization. Has Google bought all the data, or received the data for free in some way for exchange of services?
Regardless of the issues, Google seems to have managed what was thought to be improbable: collecting data from a great magnitude of small governments, compiled them and provided them online for people to use free of charge. Whether this will be viewed as evil in the future or not remains to be seen, but for now, Google seems to be doing better than all government initiatives for data interoperability and single warehousing solutions.
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