Google Ocean…?
PCPro in the UK is reporting that Google may unveil a new product in its family of mapping tools – Google Ocean! The application would feature topographic layers of the ocean floor, underwater photos, and even points of interest like famous ship wrecks. For those intreguied by the inner space, this should be great! Now call me when someone makes the first Google Earth Pirates of the Ocean Text and Map Adventure Game (TM) 🙂
6 Replies to “Google Ocean…?”
Comments are closed.
Sweet!
I think this has been in the works for some time. I first heard a rumor about it early last year and that Sylvia Earl was advising on the project. Would have been nice if they had gotten an actual spatial / remote sensing person. Hopefully they did. Would be awesome to see NRT remote sensing data in Google Earth and Maps.
I did notice a high res bathymetry layer in Google Maps yesterday that I had never noticed before. Looks like the NCDC or Gebco global bathy dataset. Has all the same artifacts 🙂
Looks like they have added the same bathy later to Google Earth as well.
Yeah, you can always tell data sources by looking for consistent errors 🙂
GEBCO have released a new global bathymetric grid with 30 arc-second spacing — the GEBCO_08 Grid. This is now available for download from http://www.bodc.ac.uk/data/online_delivery/gebco/
The GEBCO_08 Grid was generated by combining quality-controlled ship depth soundings with interpolation between sounding points guided by satellite derived gravity data. It is a continuous terrain model for ocean and land with the land data largely derived from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM30) data set.
Although every effort has been made to reduce the number of errors in the data set, we expect that some grid artifacts will be found. It is currently a development product which will undergo periodic update. Should users identify grid artifacts we would be very grateful for feedback 🙂
Uhh, Google already has a project codenamed Project Ocean – its for their ambitious scan every book and provide it online…so would have been good to mention that!