Patent 8122341 was granted and assigned to Google on February, 2012 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Users can collaborate to annotate a map by sharing geographical information. Map data can be stored locally or remotely while annotations are stored in an annotation server. A presentation device such as a personal computer can use the map data to display a map and can access the annotations on the annotation server and display them. Different users can edit the annotations and save them on the annotation server. The annotations presented to users who are simultaneously viewing them can be synchronized. Presentation devices can download modules for sharing geographical information from servers such as web servers.