Robert Rosenberg recently emailed us to let us know about a very ambitious new project he’s working on, called the Illustrated History of the World. In his words:
The IHW project is the Foundation’s effort to bring together existing multi-media web content such as Google Earth, You Tube, and Wikipedia in order to create an interactive narrative of world history based upon the content of our Tables of Instances.
If things go as well as they’re hoping, the result could be a very useful resource for teachers and students to help supplement their history and geography lessons.
As of now, the project is a bit cumbersome to load on your computer, as the main KMZ file is roughly 108MB! They’re already working on ways to reduce the size of that, likely putting it into a network link so it can be loaded in smaller chunks as needed. The other advantage to using a network link is that the data can be automatically updated, rather than requiring the user to re-download it from their site.
You can learn more on their website at TribusOrganum.org. They’ve also started a thread in the Google Earth Community to help solicit more feedback.