[georss] KML into OGC

[Jason Birch]

Marc wrote:
> I from my side cannot be happy with this process. I want all of them to 
> sit together at a table and agree on a common format. They have managed 
> to do this for the sitemap protocol why can't they do it for geospatial 
> formats?

Both Sitemap and OpenSearch started out with one party and ended up
being pushed out as independent specs and used by the others.  This kind
of loose collaboration on important items is very encouraging... and it
makes sense.  If one company comes up with a well-accepted standard, the
others don't mind playing catch-up as long as they can take immediate
advantage of the publishing mind share that the other company has built.

I believe that the same thing will happen with KML, regardless of where
the standardisation process takes place.  Yahoo has already stated that
KML is one of their targets in developing output formats for
pipes.yahoo.com.

OGC is a good umbrella (from my perspective) for KML standardisation.
Not just from a webmaster's perspective, but also from a GIS
professional's perspective.  It will allow for a stronger bridge between
the online community and the traditional analytical GIS community (both
proprietary and open source).

> I want my clients, my users be able to find my data with whatever search 
> engine they are using and I want them to be able to see and browse my 
> data with whatever geobrowsing tool they are using. This is all I want 
> and I don't care about how the markup looks like as long as I have to 
> learn and implement one and only one markup format.

That sure would be nice.  I hope that the online community (in
conjunction with OGC) can behave better in this regard than the
proprietary GIS companies, some of whom still believe that having closed
data formats gives them a competitive advantage.

Jason

Disclosure, since some of you probably don't know me:  My municipality
is a member of the OGC (at my request), and I am personally active in
the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and the MapGuide Open Source
project.  I have been a KML "author" since the early days, and I am
responsible for various proprietary (and some open source) GIS software
and databases in my day job.