I happened upon an interesting article titled “Integrating Oracle Spatial with Google Earth” yesterday on the Oracle web site. The article is authored by Justin Lokitz of Leica Geosystems (formerly of Oracle Corporation and Acquis Inc.). It discusses using the open source software GeoServer. The article has a very good discussion of using GeoServer to read the Oracle database and create KML that can be ingested dynamically (via a Network Link) by Google Earth. The entire process seems to be somewhat straightforward. It should also be noted that Justin has posted an addendum to the article on his OraGIS blog. Finally, the folks at GeoServer have also posted a six+ minute movie highlighting how the data can be ingested by Google Earth.
After looking at GeoServer, the software looks very cool. It appears to be a data broker (for lack of a better term) that allow you to transform “typical” GIS data (shapefile, Oracle Locator, ArcSDE, etc.) to standards-based formats that can be used by today’s “main stream” applications like Google Earth (via KML/KMZ), Google Maps/Yahoo Maps/Microsoft Virtual Earth (via GeoRSS), Flex/Flash (via WMS/WFS), GIS applications (via WMS/WFS), etc.
However, do keep in mind that each of these applications has different licensing agreements. For instance, Google Earth is free for
personal, non-commercial use only. Furthermore, there are some restrictions on the online mapping applications. In the end, just make sure to read the licensing agreements of the software that will be the client for your application …ideally before developing the application 🙂 .
[…] KML with Google Earth at work. Now that it’s legal, I’m looking forward to trying out Justin Lokitz’s GeoServer/Google Earth tutorial in greater […]