Google mapping spec made industry standard

Members of industry group the Open Geospatial Consortium have approved Google's KML technology as an open standard for describing some geographic data.

KML is used to manage the display of geospatial information in Google Earth, the company's software for flying over the surface of a virtual globe. With its 3D co-ordinate-based system, people can create models of city buildings, draw a line showing where they have hiked or overlay their own custom place names on a generic map.

Google hopes standardising KML will help mean broader use for the map description language, with rivals such as Microsoft already embracing it. Google already shares its KML format openly, and others have used it in software products, but the search giant now hopes that its status as an official Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard will decrease the number of barriers to further adoption.

"What OGC brings to the table is [that] everyone has confidence we won't take advantage of the format or change it in a way that will harm anyone," said Michael Weiss-Malik, Google's KML product manager. "The goal is to prevent market fragmentation."

File formats can give strategic value to those who control them, as a gateway to the data held by people and companies. In one high-profile example, open-source allies launched an attack on Microsoft's Office stronghold with the OpenOffice.org software, which can mostly read and write to Microsoft's file formats.

One front in that war was the establishment of OpenOffice's file formats as an industry standard — OpenDocument Format (ODF) — a move Microsoft countered with its own Office Open XML (OOMXL) effort, which Google opposed.

There has not been much reluctance to use KML. For example, the latest Virtual Earth and Live Maps technology from Microsoft can use KML to let users export user information to navigation devices, and the Microsoft site can overlay KML files from the internet onto its Live Maps.

According to Weiss-Malik, standardisation will make KML even more palatable for public-sector users. "Governments like to say they can publish to OGC KML instead of Google KML," he said. "We're just starting to see the birth of map publishing."

KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language. It was initially developed by Keyhole, the satellite-imagery company acquired by Google in 2004. Keyhole's technology was built into the Google Maps site and the Google Earth software. The OGC version, which geographic information system (GIS) software specialist Galdos Systems helped bring to the standardisation process, is based on KML 2.2. The official KML standard can be downloaded from the OGC website.

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