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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Google Earth Logo

Before we begin, let us make a distinction. Google Maps and Google Earth are not one of the same. Google Maps is a web-based application that allows people to view maps on a web page. There are three main features Google Maps offers:

1. Users can search by location (i.e. for restaurants within their current map view).
2. Users can ask for directions in a multimodal transportation system (i.e. driving, public transport, etc).
3. Users can add their own data to the map, but only if they can master the Google Maps API (not a hard task, but not something the average person will do).

Google Earth on the other hand is a desktop application that provides the first two functionalities (search and direction), as well as an easy way to add your own data, one point at a time, to your map. There are of course some more capabilities present, like measurements of paths and the ability to upload and share your data with other Google Earth users. But Google Earth is not only what most people user. There are 2 more editions.

1. Google Earth Pro
   Provides some data import functionality from existing GIS data sources (shapefiles, etc) and spreadsheets.
2. Google Earth Enterprise
   The infrastructure that power Google Earth and Google maps at your fingertips, to create your own versions of them. The main advantage is data management of terrabytes of data, with 2 dimensional web maps and 3 dimensional globes.

All of Google’s offerings in the arena of geographic data are impressive to say the least, and worthy of attention. But are they truly GIS?

If one wants to define GIS, one needs to run back to definitions used throughout the years by academics and software publishers alike. Leaving the issue of people running the system and organizational contexts that build the system in a certain way, GIS is defined by the following components:

• Data: The very basic component is of course measurements. Without them, a GIS cannot function. Undoubtedly, Google has made data available in an unprecedented way.
• Representation: Measurements need to be represented in a format that the computer understands in order to operate on. Google Maps/Earth do have this. The famous KML format is one example on how Google does it.
• Operations: This is where Google Maps/Earth get a bit left behind. Granted, there is the search functionality and route finding operations, but is this the only thing a GIS can do? Out of the box, most GIS offerings have operations for slope calculation, linear referencing, buffering, and many more. Google Maps/Earth lack this functionality at their current state.
• Transformations: In this case, we do not simply refer to transformations from one data format to another, but also transformations from simple measurements out in the world, to the results of an analytical process (a report if you may). The pathway from measurement to data to information is not clear, and unfortunately not present in many cases.

If one uses then one of the commonly accepted definitions of GIS, one cannot easily place Google Maps/Earth in this realm. This is not to say that they do not partially provide functionalities that a GIS would, but rather that they are limited and not the whole picture. A pollution dispersion problem would not be solved by Google Maps/Earth. A study of the distribution of populations among some characteristic cannot be rigorously performed (visually perhaps, but can anyone report error numbers visually?).

I therefore suggest that Google Maps/Earth, as well as offerings by other vendors, like Virtual Earth, Bing Maps, Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest should not be called GIS, but rather Mapping Information Systems, or even Networked Mapping Tools. Partially a GIS, but lacking the full functionality needed.

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