Google Maps Gallery recognised as an interactive digital atlas.

On Thursday, Google launched a new feature in Google Maps known by Google Maps Gallery. The Google Maps Gallery is a specialized maps using Google’s Google Maps Engine and share them online. It has an interactive digital maps provided by businesses, governments, non profit organizations, such as US Geological Survey, National Geographic, Worlds Bank Group, Florida Emergency Management and the City of Edmonton. The SETI Institute also published a series of planetary maps.

Jordan Breckenridge, Google Maps Product Manager gave the reason behind the Public Data Program is to reveal the maps and geospatial information that many organizations have with themselves. The data which are not available in public or its often in PDF or image file. The Google Maps Gallery includes construction projects, historic battlefields, Internet users worldwide, US congressional districts, climate change data, public school ratings, and much more. “The intent here is to provide an interactive digital atlas around anyone’s mapping content,” Breckenridge said.

National Geographic Maps director of digital development Frank Biasi said that the majority of its maps could only be seen in paper form. But now that the organization has joined Google's Gallery, these maps are available to all.

"Over the last 125 years, National Geographic has developed and published more than 800 maps, as one of our primary vehicles for achieving our mission to inspire people to care about the planet," Biasi said in a statement. "But access to these maps has been limited due to their physical printed nature and their range of publication dates. Maps Gallery makes our entire collection and individual maps discoverable and viewable to the world through a simple Google Maps user experience."

Google wrote, “Maps included in the Gallery can be viewed in Google Earth and are discoverable through major search engines, making it seamless for citizens and stakeholders to access diverse mapping data, such as locations of municipal construction projects, historic city plans, population statistics, deforestation changes and up-to-date emergency evacuation routes.”

Participants selected by Google received free access to the enterprise version of Google Maps Engine to import public data into Maps Engine.

Breckenridge supposes that people will be accessing the Google Maps Gallery through Google Search instead of the Gallery, so the company is looking as to how to highlight searches in the Google Search results and Google Earth too.

Google is also thinking of how user's develop the app with the help of free Google Maps Engine Lite service and make them more discoverable.