Re: Google Maps Hackers Just Don’t Get It - “It’s All Moot”
From the comments about Google Maps Hackers:
It’s all moot. Hardly anyone, including the GIS professionals, attaches metadata anyways. Even when you do, nobody else knows what do with it.
Actually ESRI does include metadata with their ArcWeb Services datasets. Take a look at the U.S Street Map Service metadata page. This information is available for every ArcMap service. But it isn’t just ESRI. Geodata.gov has extensive metadata as well as other providers of data (when you get satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe, they give it to you).
Before the API was released, it really wasn’t a big deal to know how up to date the information is on these web mapping services, but now that they have opened up the API, publishers need to know how relevant the information is before investing time in Google Maps. Do the hackers care? Maybe not, but if they expect professionals to ever develop using the Google Maps API, this will have to change. ESRI’s ArcWeb does offer this and I suspect when AWS 2005 is released will reap the benefits of having their metadata available for every data layer they offer.
Its quite funny when people call metadata “moot” simply because “other people” dont do it. Problem is that the “other people” is in this case is google. Seems as though every man and his dog is jumping on the google bandwagon with no idea on what theyre investing in. Sure its cool, but at the end of the day it all comes down to your spatial data.
Would you spend $50k on an enterprise google earth license? I sure wouldnt if you were relying on their imagery. No metadata, no time, no satellite details, no accuracy, nothing. Good luck trying to find out when they intend to fly their next run of updates … 1, 2 or 5 years? Take your pick. I have no idea and i dont think they do (except for maybe the US).