KML is a now an official OGC Standard
Google announced yesterday that KML is now an official OGC standard. With this step, KML has taken yet another step in a remarkable “career”: originally developed by Keyhole (hence the name Keyhole Markup Language) for their product Earth Viewer, the format was adopted by Google for Google Earth, which was developed based on the Keyhole Earth Viewer after Google’s acquisition of Keyhole in 2004. KML has since been added as a supported format to numerous (Web-)mapping and GIS tools. With the adoption by the OGC, KML is no longer under control of Google. OGC regards it as complementary to their existing standards (especially GML) and will probably harmonize future versions of KML with other OGC standards. I think this step will bring the two worlds of map mash-ups / online GIS and professional GIS a bit closer together and make exchange a lot easier, which will finally also make professional use of volunteered geographic information (VGI) a lot easier.
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