The document discusses research and development related to WebGL, Closure Tools, GDAL, and MapRank. It describes WebGL Earth, an open source 3D digital globe project using WebGL. It also discusses the Closure Tools JavaScript library and compiler from Google, GDAL for geodata processing, and MapTiler Cluster for parallelized tile rendering from geospatial rasters. Future plans include direct vector rendering, mobile support, and integration with Google MapsGL and OpenLayers.