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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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. You'd need to add the geospatial information to the photos to get something you could import into Fusion.

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.

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.

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