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Google Earth Enterprise Open Source

opengee.org

143 pointshappy-go-lucky27 comments

This is huge. A while back this product was offered in the enterprise market for ~$100k per instance.

We have been using CesiumJS (https://cesiumjs.org/), which is fantastic, partly because Google stopped developing Google Earth. But it would be great to see new features added to a very mature product.

From: https://github.com/google/earthenterprise/wiki/Google-Earth-...

"The Google Earth Enterprise Client (EC) is required to connect to Earth Server and view 3D globes. This client is not open-sourced; but will continue to be maintained by the Google Earth Team."

That's a shame.

So what did they open source, exactly?

The server.

Fusion Server - imports and 'fuses' imagery, vector and terrain source data in to a single flyable 3D globe or 2D map.

GEE Server - Apache or Tornado-based server which hosts the private globes built by Fusion.

GEE Portable - A disconnected globe that allows you to access your data in a local-server configuration

It would be nice if they opened the protocol specs up. But I'm happy to have a professionally maintained client binary signed by google. Much easier to get it distributed.

https://github.com/google/earthenterprise/wiki/Google-Earth-...

Here's the link to the documentation (PDF) for more infos: https://github.com/google/earthenterprise/raw/master/earth_e...

This doc is an improvement over most technical projects (it has an Audience section, hurrah) & is certainly better than the waste of time visiting the submitted link was, but… this PDF should be front-and-centre in the GitHub repo and available as HTML in the wiki.

>a geospatial application which provides the ability to build and host custom 3D globes and 2D maps

Always great when the main page is full of advertising speak, but has no clear description of what the software actually does. You'll find that on GitHub or the developer page. WHY?

You know how Google Maps lets you zoom around a flat 2D map, and how Google Earth lets you zoom around satellite imagery in 3D?

Google Earth Enterprise is the software that lets you build your maps, from your own satellite imagery or vector data, and serve them in 2D or 3D.

(Disclaimer: I work at Google, and used to work on GEE.)

Is this BYO terrain data? It looks like Google Earth Engine with no dataset?

Yes. The github readme [1] has more info:

Earth Enterprise is the open source release of Google Earth Enterprise, a geospatial application which provides the ability to build and host custom 3D globes and 2D maps. Earth Enterprise does not provide a private version of Google imagery that's currently available in Google Maps or Earth.

The application suite consists of three core components:

Fusion - imports and 'fuses' imagery, vector and terrain source data in to a single flyable 3D globe or 2D map.

Server - Apache or Tornado-based server which hosts the private globes built by Fusion.

Client - the Google Earth Enterprise Client (EC) and Google Maps Javascript API V3 used to view 3D globes and 2D maps, respectively.

Similar text appears on their 'Getting Started' page [2].

[1] https://github.com/google/earthenterprise [2] http://www.opengee.org/development/getting-started.html

At first glance, I don't understand the use cases for this, or what implications its being open sourced could have. Maybe someone could help explain its uses?

Looking at the website, there's four use cases linked, but only one of the options is available as text, and it still left me a bit unclear.

GEE lets you take a lots of imagery and vector data and process it together so that it can be displayed on Google Earth or anything that can render simple imagery tiles like the Google Maps API. It can run locally / on prem which is a big benefit if connectivity is a challenge for your business or end-users. Previously, this was something Google sold but was deprecated a few years ago. Now that it's open source people can keep using it :-)

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on GEE.

So as an example, if I had a lot of aerial photography of an area taken with a drone, would this be something I should research to stich together all of the raw / separate photographs into a map?

No, but once you had stitched together your photos and made a (georeferenced) map you could use this to combine those photos with terrain data and vector data you have from other sources and present the combined data in a google earth like viewer.

One advantage is that you can now host that viewer and the data on your own server (with any access restrictions you may wish to add) and even make the whole thing available for offline viewing.

No. You'd need to add the geospatial information to the photos to get something you could import into Fusion.

You are an oil company that has imagery and data not available publicly. Your users have used Google Earth for the last ten years and like it.

Here is the github link in case you're searching for it: https://github.com/google/earthenterprise

Can anyone from Open Street Maps comment on how this release impacts their various projects? Does it fill in any missing functionality? I've lost track of the range of OSM projects but I know there's been a lot of work on improving the 3D dataset. Are there any sources for global satellite imagery under a reasonable licence?

Previous HN discussion for the earlier announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13528456

I am the only one that finds the recent HN feature change that makes it impossible to upvote older stories annoying?

(I prefer to have all my upvoted stories in one list)

Instead of upvoting the story, you can favorite it. This will also upvote it if it can still be upvoted.

You can also favorite a comment - you can't do it directly from the comment thread, but click on the comment's date/time link and you can favorite it from there.

You can find all your favorited stories and comments from your user page.

The one caveat is that unlike upvotes, favorites are public. There doesn't seem to be a way to create private favorites other than keeping your own list outside the site.

I know that. That option is made very clear each time I click on upvote on an old story via an full screen info message. But as mentioned above, I want just one private list of upvoted stories. The changed interface is annoying and less useful. Why not let someone upvote an older story? (maybe without increasing the vote-count)

I'm sorry, I don't know why those changes were made, I'm just a random user trying to be helpful and provide a possible alternative. And I'm embarrassed to say I forgot about that full screen message you mentioned.

You're right, the old system did have some advantages!

Should have called it GEEOS

The GitHub repo is at https://github.com/google/earthenterprise/

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