google earth enterprise

As we mentioned in February, Google has decided to Open Source Google Earth Enterprise. It is available for download on GitHub.

[ Update: Thank you to GEB reader Eddy Shipman for pointing us to www.opengee.org the official Google Earth Enterprise site.]

According to the docs, it only runs on 64-bit versions of:
– Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 6.0 to 7.2, including the most recent security patches
– CentOS 6.0 to 7.2
– Ubuntu 10.04, 12.04 and 14.04 LTS

Google Earth Enterprise consists of three core components:

Fusion – imports and ‘fuses’ imagery, vector and terrain source data, into 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. The client is not open source, but Google is providing it free of charge.

In general, it is an enterprise product and probably not of much interest to the casual user. But if you are in the GIS community and have imagery or even vector-based mapping data you wish to share, it may well be worth a look. There is also an opportunity for cloud services to offer preinstalled versions of it, possibly with Landsat and Sentinel-2 or other open imagery datasets.

Google has just announced that it is open sourcing Google Earth Enterprise. Google Earth Enterprise is software that can be used to host the equivalent of the Google Earth or the Google Maps databases. This is useful for organisations that have their own datasets that they would like to share internally or with customers.

The announcement post shows this image:

Presumably it can potentially also be used to share datasets with the public, not just private access as described.

We actually don’t know much more about Google Earth Enterprise as it has, until now, been restricted to use by governments and enterprises with big budgets.

In early 2015, Google made the decision to discontinue its Google Earth Enterprise business and stopped charging current customers for it. At the same time made Google Earth Pro free. The intention at the time was to move customers to alternative products from companies such as Esri. Esri even went as far as to create a Google Earth look-alike as part of that transition. However, it would seem that many customers got used to free and are happy with the Google Earth Enterprise product. And so, they did not move, hence Google’s decision to open source the platform. We applaud Google’s decision on this as it shows they do care about their customers even two years after depreciating the product. Admittedly, Google is hoping that Google Earth Enterprise users will make use of Google’s cloud platform, but that is not a requirement to use the product.