from http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/07/where_20_first.html
(July 2005)

This morning the Google Maps mailing list digest had a nugget of gold:
David Knight has released a small javascript file that enables you to
add (almost) any WMS layer to your google map (for a live example,
visit globalcoordinate.com and click the "LANDSAT" button). David
writes:

I have only tested this with a couple of WMS servers, but in theory it
should work with almost any. The bbox parameter in the url will be
written as latitude and longitude so this code will not work with UTM
type projections.

This is an amazing success for Google (and for David--great
programming!). The geospatial/GIS world has a huge number of open APIs
defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. David's work lets you draw
in tiles from almost any GIS source in the world.

If you were at Where 2.0, you probably saw the really impressive
Geotango GlobeView. GlobeView is a bit like Google Earth in
appearance, but it can pull in data straight from GIS sources that
support the OGC standards. I think of Google Maps and Google Earth as
two different sides of the same coin: one's in the browser, one's on
the desktop, but they're both struggling toward the same goal.

OGC standards play a role in this goal, as you can tell from this
thread on the Keyhole mailing list about a hacker adding Google
Earth's KML output to Geotools so you can translate map features to be
viewable in Google Earth. Suhweet!

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http://www.geoplace.com/uploads/FeatureArticle/0511gml.asp
GML and KML : geo markup languages

http://www.gearthblog.com/

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2005/08/3d_buildings_in.html
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/71282/page/
3D building with texture 

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

"GIS Unshackled - A Guide to Open Source Tools" short article
http://www.geoplace.com/uploads/featurearticle/0508gd.asp