Slashgeo

Raj Singh discuss on his blog the Open Geospatial Consortium efforts to standardize Google's KML format. From the post: "And one crucial point that I think a lot of people miss is the legal intellectual property aspect. Bringing KML into OGC isn’t just about what features end up in that XML format. It’s just as much about making sure the format is royalty-free to use forever. We all know the Google mantra is “don’t be evil” (and the people I know there completely live up to the mantra), but OGC standardization means you don’t have to take their word for it."

Following previous indications, Paul Ramsey at GeoTips has an interesting entry on Google's KML becoming an OGC standard. From the entry: "The quotation captures Jones' excitement about the potential of KML as an interchange format, a way of sharing and linking geospatial data. The process of bringing KML into the OGC will be: * The OGC will develop a "position paper" explaining how KML relates to the OGC standards baseline. * KML 2.1 will be re-published as an official OGC "best practices document". * The OGC Mass Market working group will begin working on KML 3.0. * In the meantime, Google may add changes to the KML 2.X stream, and the OGC Mass Market group will decide whether they are worthy of propagation into KML 3.0. The whole process is anticipated to take less than a year." More on the site, a very interesting read. Be aware that Paul added "The post below on KML includes information about preliminary decisions that are not the policy of the OGC until they are officially approved by the higher governing bodies of the OGC." Ogle Earth adds a discussion on KML 3.0.

High Earth Orbit brings us news about this new library. From their summary : "libkml is interesting in several ways. KML itself is just an XML specification for geographic data. Nothing really special compared to other XML formats. However, as I’ve championed there is a big difference between types of developers that use and read schemas, and those that use libraries or simple examples and documentation to implement parsers or tools. This is justified in that developers (both consumers and producers as discussed here) are usually trying to solve some other problem and want to use a format like KML merely as a mechanism to publish and visualize their information. By providing a stable and full-featured library, developers are free to build tools around the library without having to deal with the intricacies and issues of the format itself."

For a pretty detailed article with more information, visit the High Earth Orbit article.

The Digital Earth Weblog discuss the new OGC membership availability for individuals: "* Non-voting participation in the Technical Committee (TC) * Non-voting participation in working groups of the TC. * Can be a Participant in OGC Interoperability Initiatives on an in-kind resource basis, without monetary compensation. If I’m reading that correctly it means you can offer your time and expertise for free, but you cannot influence the outcome when it comes to a vote." And not unimportant, the OGC is requesting comments over its version of KML, you have until January 4th. Related, the Free Geography Tools details a free KML to GPX converter and the S-M-GIS blog shortly discuss the integration of KML in Virtual Earth. A few previous related stories copied below.

Correction : The Google Earth Blog actually reported this story yesterday. My apologies to the blog's author.

Ogle Earth reports first about this major VE update. Head on over there for more details, but the new features are :

• Importing of GeoRSS and GPX and.... KML!
• Bird's eye view in 3D
• 3D modelling
• Better search

A longer more detailed list can be found here in the Virtual Earth Developer Forum. Be sure to check out the Sketchup Killer app they bundled with the update. Right click on the 3D globe, and select "Add 3D model". It will install the modelling app at this point. Update: 10/17 13:39 GMT by S : I added a few related stories below. This is really a major improvement of Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Here's another GEB entry on the new KML support in VE. SharpGIS offers a few interesting screenshots. And be sure to read the official Virtual Earth blog entry. Oh, and Microsoft have rejoined the Open Geospatial Consortium, this is great news!

A new OSGeo mailing list is now up: standards@lists.osgeo.org. The new list will host discussions on topics related to the huge world of standards, focusing on and starting from existing and possible relationships between OGC standards and activities on open source geospatial software.

Here's the link to signup: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/standards

The Geobloggers blog announces the support in Flickr for GeoRSS and KML. From the post: "geoFeed: This is the good old fashioned RSS feed, but only of the photos that have location information. [...] Why? You may ask, are you calling it a geoFeed and not geoRSS? Well, I’d say, that’s a good question. And the answer is probably because it’s actually just a RSS feed that includes geo information, in ‘geoRSS’ format and W3C format. [...] In Flickr’s case the KML we’re throwing out is a Network Link, that’s wraps up the actual KML. Each hour, or when you restart Google Earth, it’ll go and get the latest 20 (sorry no more than 20, the next logical step is KML output direct from the API for things like that) geotagged photos." See also related stories below.

Numerous geoblogs discussed KML lately, here's some of them. The High Earth Orbit provides four informative entries on the "KML 3" format: a discussion on the next version of KML, the Core module, the styling module and the metadata module. Ogle Earth also provides some more links on KML 3 and a Firefox extension to show KML data directly in the browser. Finally, Spatially Adjusted display the KML Home Companion 3.0.2 just released and discuss the demo of Arc2Earth V2, the tool to publish ArcGIS data to Google Earth. Make sure you're aware of previous stories below about the standardization of Google's KML by the Open Geospatial Consortium.

The Geothough blog informs us Microsoft has plan to support Google's kml format in Virtual Earth. From the blog: "[...] in the Microsoft "vendor spotlight" presentation which just finished, the speaker said that Virtual Earth will support the ability to display KML in a September / October release this year. [...] so I think this is a very welcome announcement (assuming it's correct), which can only cement KML's position as a de facto standard (I don't think Microsoft could have stopped KML's momentum, but if they had released a competing format it would have been an unfortunate distraction)." Don't forget Google's KML is slowly becoming an OGC standard.

Charlie Savage has an interesting and severe critic of geospatial standards, including GML, WMS, SLD, WFS and of course KML and GeoRSS are also discussed. Here's a recent previous entry from the same blog on the same topic. From the first link: "So do you see these standards used on the Web? I sure don't. Instead I see people using RSS and ATOM with GeoRSS, or shoehorning feature information into KML. There is event talk of shoehorning GML into KML. [...] So standards strike out on map rendering and sharing geographic features, but have succeeded in specifying locations and custom map content. And there is an interesting pattern here - the dejure standards have failed, while the defacto standards have succeeded."

I updated the poll to ask you what you think about the idea of OGC's standardization of Google's KML format, which was recently mentioned. The previous poll results about online geospatial news sources are interesting: 30% of those who answered claimed Slashgeo.org suits their needs with another 10% indicating PlanetGS, which includes Slashgeo stories, suits their needs. 40% of users say they use 2 or more sources (22% at 4+ sources) while 18% say they don't read any source regularly. 50 people who participated is a small sample out of the ~3000 single individuals who read Slashgeo daily. I'm surprised and happy to see some people like our selection of stories. This is where I believe Slashgeo has value: trying to aggregate the most pertinent geospatial news so you don't have to monitor 50 online sources as I do...

Raj Singh shares his thoughts in two entries about KML and the OGC. See the few previous stories below to get the context. From the former entry: "First of all, there’s a widespread misconception that KML is a data format. This viewpoint doesn’t do justice to the complex problems geospatial data encodings solve, and just as importantly sells short the elegant way KML tackles a different need in the market. [...] First of all, KML is a highly successful format whose design and features have been proven in the pressure cooker of the marketplace. We do not want to damage that legacy. This new OGC Best Practices paper lays out KML 2.1 as the basis of our work. [...] The OWS-5 Testbed has a thread devoted to experimentation with KML, and is designed to spur the development of new tools to create and share these new experimental versions of KML."

The Google Earth Blog is reporting that KML has finally been approved as an OGC/ISO standard. From their summary : "The file format developed initially for Google Earth to exchange geographic information and mapping presentations is now an international standard. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) will now take control over the KML standard."

For more information and the links to the relative announcements, please visit the Google Earth Blog.
Update: 04/15 19:34 GMT by S : Here's the official announcement.