Towards Google Earth: A History of Earth Geography

Abstract

Using geographical information systems (GIS) has been of great interest lately. A lot of GIS applications are being introduced to regular and noncomputer-expert people through their everyday used machines such as cars (GPS), mobile (location systems), Internet (locating systems and direction guiders), and others. ”Google Earth,” a free online application, is one of those online geographical systems that provide users with a variety of functionalities towards exploring any place on the earth. The software uses Internet to connect to the online world database and travel in seconds between cities. This chapter briefly explores “Google Earth” and presents a possible future view and an extension of this GIS application by adding a time feature that gives “Google Earth” the ability to store the history of the geographical information that leads towards a new “Google Earth: A History of Earth Geography.” For this purpose, the chapter presents storage and indexing approaches to be used for the storage, indexing, retrieval, and manipulation of geographical data used by the geographical database of the world used by “Google Earth.”