Google, you have to be kidding. Right?

1 KipterUh // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:08 am

So the KML Product Manager decides that KML is now the HTML of Geospatial content?

Reality need not visit the Googleplex I guess anymore.

2 Lefty // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:10 am

So true KipterUh… The arrogance of Google just amazes me sometimes.

3 Daniel // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:36 am

Seems logical to me guys. Remember Google did invent GIS.

4 dijj monkey // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:38 am

“Mapping has come a long way from the origami paper creations of the past.”

???

is that how they tracked paper crane habitat back in feudal Japan?

5 Gretch // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:40 am

OMG (and I don’t say OMG very much)….

Well thank god tht google is looking out for us GIS losers.

6 Cellulose // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:41 am

I don’t understand the problem. Lots of people use KML. KML is starting off as a relatively easy to use langauge and evolving into something more complex. KML has been adopted by a standards-body that has a weird mish-mash of standards that are unreadable at times and takes many iterations to get “right”… and language itself is never rendered the same way by two different browsers.

Sounds right to me– it is the HTML of Geographic Context… (that all said, KML is fine. I just worry about OGC taking over it!)

7 Lefty // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:43 am

@Cellulose It is only available everywhere because google pushes it. Without Google, 99% of folks wouldn’t have heard of KML. KML itself isn’t what makes KML popular, it is the losers looking for airplanes in GE that do.

8 Erin // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:45 am

HTML you can create gorgeous looking web pages.

KML looks like crap everywhere because you can’t control the look and feel of the lines. I guess I’ll stick to my old fashioned origami.

9 Larry Reynolds // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:49 am

yea I don’t think the HTML = KML equation is just there yet.

At least we can be assured that Frank over at GEarthblog will be blogging about how great this is and how wonderful OGC is.

OGC is the bane of my existence.

10 Lindy J. // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:51 am

Mapping has come a long way from the origami paper creations of the past.

OK, I’ll say it… WTF? Without folks like me we’d have crappy looking KML everywhere.

11 Prague // Apr 14, 2008 at 12:01 pm

KML is a lot more than “losers looking for airplanes” on google earth. Mapping has exploded over the last couple years, thanks in part to KML. There is a universe of maps out there, made mostly be people who probably wouldn’t have imagined making a map only a few years ago. i don’t see anything wrong with KML being recognized as a standard by the OGC. Surely there are more players and content-creators in the GIS world than only google - however, you’d have a hard time convincing me that google has done anything bad by providing KML / google maps API to the public. I’d go further and say that they have helped revolutionize mapping and even bring an element of sexiness to geography.

12 David Davis // Apr 14, 2008 at 12:04 pm

@Prague: I don’t think most have a problem with KML. I think most have a problem with the attitude of the blog post James linked to. You have to admit that “Mapping has come a long way from the origami paper creations of the past” is as bad as “losers looking for airplanes”.

Mapping has come a long way, but it isn’t KML that has gotten us there.

13 James Fee // Apr 14, 2008 at 12:10 pm

Hey guys, does the fact that KML is now an OGC standard matter to how you use it?

For me it doesn’t, OGC is irrelevant to its use. No one uses HTML because it is maintained by W3C, nor will anyone use KML because it is maintained by OGC. People will use it because there is a need to use it, not because someone has it on a list.

14 Jake B // Apr 14, 2008 at 12:52 pm

…Mapping has come a long way from the origami paper creations of the past….

Are they trying to singlehandedly alienate us “Origami Paper” creators?

15 USGSER // Apr 14, 2008 at 1:21 pm

…don’t buy into this for one second… KML is great and has been revolutionary but a couple years from now we’ll all be talking about the next big thing, or next programming language once KML has grown stale.

16 Bill // Apr 14, 2008 at 1:26 pm

Wow. That might be the most pompous piece of drivel I’ve read in a long time. I hope Google didn’t hurt their arms trying to pat themselves on the back.

Well, back to uninstalling Google Earth…

17 leave me be // Apr 14, 2008 at 2:34 pm

I think it is a fairly reasonable statement, in that html is a fairly straight forward open standard for representing text, and hyperlinks. certainly h1-h3, bold, center and underline are not all that is needed for beautiful typography, but a format that is widely useable, widely adopted and readily understood. KML i think matches this pretty well.

18 James Fee // Apr 14, 2008 at 2:38 pm

@leave me be: What about GML? Or because it isn’t Google that doesn’t count?

19 Sean Gillies // Apr 14, 2008 at 2:39 pm

Shorter Planet Geospatial: KML OGC OMFG!! Breath into a paper bag for a few minutes and calm down. KML was already a de facto standard.

20 James Fee // Apr 14, 2008 at 2:42 pm

Do you always have to put a turd in the punchbowl Sean?

21 Sean Gillies // Apr 14, 2008 at 2:46 pm

I didn’t do it, man!

22 Sean Gillies // Apr 14, 2008 at 2:53 pm

What about GML, James? GML is the OOXML/ODF of geographic content.

It’s not a turd, it’s a burdock root, I swear. Drink up.

23 James Fee // Apr 14, 2008 at 2:59 pm

But KML is no more HTML than GML is.

Damn this is such a stupid conversation.

24 leave me be // Apr 14, 2008 at 3:26 pm

begging your indulgence - one could make the analogy (loosly) that html is to sgml like kml is to gml. one a ubiquitous and relatively simple derivative/profile of the other. and i think that is the point of the original statement — meanwhile you can sit there in quiet despair and cling to your arcgis server and your faith in the next service pack…..

25 Christopher Schmidt // Apr 14, 2008 at 3:42 pm

Why do you say that? I said the same thing a couple months ago, with no real complaint…

26 Bill // Apr 14, 2008 at 5:03 pm

@Christopher Schmidt

Yes, but somehow the tone of your post didn’t instantly piss me off.

27 Chad // Apr 14, 2008 at 7:09 pm

Ok, good.. can I go back to bed since it doesn’t matter?

28 Wab* // Apr 14, 2008 at 9:32 pm

once KML converges on Maya and the major providers converge
as well you have a lock out of non corporate content, at least that content that is not provided for free as in beer.
burp!

29 bender // Apr 15, 2008 at 12:32 am

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!
All hail to Google!

30 micah // Apr 15, 2008 at 5:55 am

I, for one, welcome our new KML overlords.

(Sorry, had to say it)

31 MSMITH // Apr 15, 2008 at 8:18 am

Wow its about time everyone understands
the arrogance factor with google.
They are not a team player, and love going in
the back door as of course they are google.
Notice they dont participate in conferences or support
any of the geospatial events, they get suites at the events
and invite people up to the google room.

32 Sean Gorman // Apr 15, 2008 at 10:04 am

Has anyone heard the rumor that ESRI is considering submitting shapefile as an OGC standard? Is KML the first time a proprietary geospatial standard has been transfered to an open standard? If so it would set a precedent, and will be interesting to see if other firms with proprietary standards follow suit.

33 Sean Gorman // Apr 15, 2008 at 10:59 am

Has anyone heard the rumor that ESRI is considering submitting shapefile to the OGC as an open standard? Could be wildly inaccurate but made me curious. It will be interesting to see if the move by Google to make KML open will prompt other vendors to do like wise.

34 Jesse // Apr 15, 2008 at 11:26 am

So if it’s not KML, what is the “HTML of geographic content”? Dare I say shapefiles? (BTW, I’m not an ESRI fan-boy).

35 GOD // Apr 15, 2008 at 12:33 pm

my son, some people call it bullshit. don’t worry about that.

36 SeanG // Apr 15, 2008 at 3:12 pm

Let me get this straight, KML is/was a proprietery version of the open GML but now is an open standard? My head hurts.

37 ChrisW // Apr 16, 2008 at 5:46 am

I’d place KML somewhere between GeoRSS and GML myself, but what do I know? And I’m not sure if HTML is necessarily an accurate comparison either, as KML at least embodies some spatial content in machine-accessible form, whereas HTML is basically just about presentation but knows nothing about content.
A bit like some major software companies we could mention…

38 Michael Jones // Apr 16, 2008 at 4:20 pm

In a very real sense the “HTML and KML” analogy comes from me, so I should take the heat that misunderstanding may have caused. I said it one year ago at the OGC meeting where we offered and then began the KML=>OGC process and I’ve been saying it ever since.

Our meaning, which many people understand, is that the broad acceptance of KML due to Earth & Maps provides the opportunity for all Earth browsers to rally around a shared markup while competing on features and data. We likened this to the Mosaic/Netscape/IE and HTML situation where different products could share the [mostly] same markup language. Our idea was to do better than that by having the standards process get started early and by subjugating our own commercial preferences in exchange for making a standard that other companies and even countries could embrace.

It has worked well so far. ESRI, Microsoft, NASA’s World Wind, and Matt Giger’s EarthBrowser all visualize KML, Adobe and others have tools to edit it, and many companies have tools to generate it. Microsoft even has reason to claim that they can visualize it better than Google Maps. This thrills me in that the debate is not a divisive battle between 20 alternative formats (a la Word, WordPerfect, …) nor is it a single dominant format as closely held IP (Word again.) Instead, we have the Google approach of being open and welcoming at the moment of our strength, a move designed to empower broader use of GIS and mapping by billions of Web users and the million or so traditional GIS users.

While some who’ve posted here may disagree, I think this bold step has been the right thing to do. The world we’re working to create is one almost exactly modeled on the role of HTML as in industry organizing principle, but in this case, for geospatial visualization.

39 AlbertW // Apr 16, 2008 at 4:49 pm

Michael: My issue with it all is KML wasn’t needed. Google/Keyhole could have worked with OGC to make GML better for their needs, but ended up created their own format. Now we’ve got yet an format that I have to support in my day job.

40 Christopher Schmidt // Apr 16, 2008 at 5:01 pm

AlbertW:

Google/Keyhole could have worked with OGC to make GML better for their needs, but ended up created their own format.

Bullshit. OGC would never have approved of changing GML to match the needs that KML meets. The use of feature-based styling is completely antithetical to everything that OGC has pursued for the past several years, and core to KML.

There was no way for OGC to evolve something like KML. There *is* nothing else like KML in the Geospatial world: there is no language which combines geometry + attributes and style/visualization rules in one format, and that’s the key thing that KML is all about.

The ‘feature’ part (which maps to GML) is close enough to GML that it is essentially as easy to support as another format of GML. (I’ve not yet seen any evidence that anyone actually supports *all* GML, only their particular flavor.) The style bits that make KML difficult to support don’t *exist* anywhere else within OGC, so it’s not ‘another format’, it’s ‘a visualization format’: no others exist in the GeoSpatial space. Everyone else (even ESRI!) seperates these aspects out.

You can argue all day over whether feature-based styling and the combination of content and styling makes sense, but you can’t claim that the right move was to try to force something like KML through OGC channels: they’d be fighting for another 10 years if they hadn’t gained more usage than all of WMS/WFS/SLD together on the public web *first*, before pushing through OGC.

41 Paul // Apr 16, 2008 at 10:02 pm

It’s interesting to see all the perspectives voiced on this thread. For me - the bottom line is that no new or emerging spatial-related functions or services will ignore Google (not that they were) via KML integration. Love ‘em or hate ‘em; ignoring Google is not good business.

I’m not partial to any GIS flavor over another; whatever is best for the problem at hand is the best one to use. However, Google has found it’s way onto my desktop - into my web browser - and onto my blackberry and I didn’t pay a dime.
It just works.

Of course, the cynic in me is just waiting for Google to start charging for new API keys.

42 GOD // Apr 17, 2008 at 2:57 am

they charge you already. they’ve put your spatial and thematical profile in the advertising cluster C64Z8CO2 and sold it to their customers.
it was very valuable.

43 Sean Gorman // Apr 17, 2008 at 7:33 am

I think from a practical stand point we are going to see standards increasingly bottoms up instead of top down. The days of a big committee spending years coming up with a 300 page specification are dwindling. GeoRSS is a great example of a successful bottoms up creation of a standard that has seen very rapid adoption. Things that are easy to use and based on practical implementations in the wild are going result in defacto standards that drive the market - IMHO

44 rkgeorge // Apr 24, 2008 at 3:00 pm

I guess GML like sdts before it never made it off the ground very far. Even though KML is extremely popular it could sure use some better client side event capabilities.

In the meantime MS seems to be headed done the track of merging WPF/XML and 3D terrain streaming that would make kml2.2 more or less anachronistic. OGC needs to push ahead toward KML3.0 with some kind of client event capability.