Google SDI

I don’t know whether to be delighted or frightened, but Google has put in place the final part of the publish-find-bind contract for a Google SDI.

Now people can publish their data in the new universal format, Google’s KML. I can find that data using a Google search. And I can bind to that data using Google’s clients — Google Earth and Google Maps.

I guess this speaks to the importance of a useful working prototype in building out collaborative technology with wide adoption. If Tim Berners-Lee had been content to just write down the specs for HTTP and HTML, we probably wouldn’t have the web (maybe we’d have a huge network built on gopher… now that would be cool). But he didn’t just do that, he built a working system at Cern that did useful stuff with HTTP and HTML, and the people at other sites could take and use too, freely.

Time to retrofit all our software to publish KML!