[georss] KML, GeoRSS, and OGC

[Joshua Lieberman]

The way I tend to look at this is that KML is really a kitchen sink  
for configuring the state of Google Earth. As such, it is much more  
akin to OWS Context than to either GML (feature encoding) or GeoRSS  
(geospatial events). As such, one could see Google and OGC agreeing  
on the container and commonly contained elements.

OGC could presumably work toward harmonizing with OWS Context by  
defining elements for a variety of information contents (GML, GeoRSS,  
SLD) and services which may or may not specifically be supported in  
GE (well, we would hope yes).

Google might add its own GE-viewable or Google-crawlable extension  
elements as well and submit them as additions to the spec for others  
to decide to support or not. There is more than a bit of goodwill and  
interoperability engineering in there, of course, but a common core  
to be supported across a range of clients is a possible outcome.

Of course, a standards "check-off" for federal procurement purposes  
is always somewhat possibility, as has been done before. In this  
respect, widespread support for real commonality, including but not  
limited to OGC and its members, could still be influential. At least  
it appears to have been relatively easy up to this point to convert  
information to / from KML with or without a standards process.

--Josh