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It has been a busy summer for the Google Earth Enterprise (GEE) team — thanks for giving us the chance to tell you a bit about what we’ve been working on. There have been some interesting product updates to speak of and some cool customer uses for GEE this summer — especially in the government sector.

GEE is one way of bringing Google’s geo technology, well known in the consumer world with Google Earth and Maps, to organizations and businesses. We find that government (and business) customers with lots of geospatial data often have a difficult time finding technology that allows employees with all different kinds of skill sets and backgrounds to work with data. GEE is built to fix that issue, letting organizations visualize the tons of vector, imagery and terrain data using Google Earth and Maps. For confidential data, GEE can live behind an organization or agency’s firewall. For the purposes of sharing information with citizens, however, GEE can also live on the web in a browser — it’s flexible.

A few weeks ago we updated GEE with some new tools that we think will be really useful to government agencies, as a part of the 3.2 version of the product. We added historical imagery and bathymetry to GEE so now government agencies (and businesses) can visualize how a region has changed over time. Organizations can timestamp and overlay their geodata and then see how the days (or years or decades) have changed the point of interest. The sub-surface terrain data option comes to GEE from Google Ocean, so agencies with lots of underwater data (literally) can now see it on their Google Earth globe.

Talking about GEE is well and good, but what is more interesting is the usage — ways organizations are actually using GEE to do innovative things. The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has set up Virtual Alabama, a GEE-based model of the state where over 500 agencies in Alabama can work from a common geo operating picture. In addition to planning for security and disaster management, Virtual Alabama also displays education, economic and agricultural data as well. You can check out this YouTube video to see what I mean.

The US Forest Service uses GEE, and built a tool called the “Automated Flight Following”
system, to visualize data transmitted by GPS devices on Forest Service planes. The info is then displayed in Google Earth by real-time location.These are just a couple of governmental use cases — definitely check out more on our customer page.

Anyhow — lots more underway this fall as we head back to the whiteboards (the Google equivalent of chalkboards where we sketch out our ideas during meetings). Thanks again for letting us guest post and check out our website if you have any more Google Earth Enterprise questions or need more info…and of course see you at GEOINT 2009 in October.

Dylan Lorimer, Google Earth Enterprise product team

Tags: GEE, GEO, GEOINT 2009, geospatial, GIS, Google, Google Earth, Google Enterprise Earth, USGIF