5 ms·

This public effort is still way behind private efforts like google earth, it seems.

• black_puppydog 7y ago
  You say that like it's written in the article but I don't see it. And even if (!) the quality of the map were slightly below google maps, having it freely available would be a huge plus nevertheless.
• 7952 7y ago
  Most of Google Earth is just based on publically available data from Nasa. They have suplemented it in places with commercial data.
• FillardMillmore 7y ago
  Google Earth was not strictly a private effort. Back in the early 2000s, Keyhole (then the company that owned the software that would become Google Earth after the acquisition) was bankrolled by a venture capital firm run by the CIA called In-Q-Tel. I'm sure there are other relations Google Earth (in particular) has had with government as well.
• dagw 7y ago
  Google earth uses older publicly available NASA data as a base and then improves it with better, often commercial, data in some interesting points. One problem with this approach is that the quality and accuracy differs wildly from place to place. For any place in at least the western world there almost certainly exists better (and sometimes open) data than this project will provide. The big win for this project isn't that the data will always be the best available, but that it will be a single source of open data of consistent quality and format for the entire earth.