A Web site sponsored by the French government that features a detailed aerial map of France went live Friday, rivaling a similar service offered by Google, owner of the world’s largest Internet search engine. Geoportail.fr was created by the French National Geographic Institute and features aerial maps of mainland France and of all the country’s overseas territories. It is competing with Google Earth, the virtual globe program that carries images obtained from satellite and aerial photography....
Geoportail reflects President Jacques Chirac's view that Anglo-Saxon culture is omnipresent on the Internet and threatens to overwhelm other cultures. The French National Library has put more than 80,000 books and newspapers clips online since early 2006 on a portal called Gallica, in response to Google Book Search....That database, and the French National Library's, will soon be followed by Quaero, a European search engine created by France and Germany and designed to compete with Google and Yahoo.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/24/2006 03:18:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
