[OSGeo-Standards] OWS-5 Agile Geography - KML 3 (more open than most)

[Simone Giannecchini]

I pretty much agree with Frank here.

I would not confuse KML with WMS or WFS. KML is more or less a (quite
rich and complex) encoding format for geo info, while WMS and WFS are
services that allow users to retrieve geo info in the format they
want/support. Well, KML can be seen as one of these formats, hence I
would not think that it can be a threat for the mentioned services.

Even though I am usually a bit suspicious against de-facto standards
pushed by big companies to become"real" standards with a nice
authority stamp on them, I think that so far KML has had a positive
impact on the whole OS geospatial community.
Google earth and google maps have brought a lot of attention on the
geospatial world at large from a vast range of people that weren't
even aware of it, namely the new-geographers (I stole this term I know
:-) ). These people are attracted by the nice interface that google is
providing them and the request for geo-services is increasing sharply
lately.
You may say that this is no good since GMaps and GE will kill other OS
software. From my experience this is not true. It is really easy to
publish your data in KML using GeoServer and MapServer, many new users
have been approaching these software because they were attracted by
this possibility. The good thing is that they quickly realize that you
can achieve almost the same results by also using OS clients like
OpenLayers or gvSIG instead of GE or GMaps (well, to be honest GE is
still one step ahead anything else IMHO).

About GML, I am pretty sure that everybody that's been working with
the 3.x series can say that it is an ugly beast, big, complex,
unfriendly, hence I am not surprised that KML took over it due to the
fact that's pretty easy to use and implement especially for simple
needs.

As I said, I am a bit suspicious about KML evolution into a standard,
but if I had to look backwards I would say that so far it has produced
bad effects only on the other big geo-companies market shares and not
on the OSGEO community. Where all this evolution will lead to, that's
not clear to me yet.


Ciao,
Simone



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Eng. Simone Giannecchini
President /CEO GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Via Carignoni 51
55041  Camaiore (LU)
Italy

phone: +39 0584983027
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