Thursday, July 6. 2006

Latest GeoServer - and Why You Should Care...

Chris Holmes has been highlighting the latest release of GeoServer (Ogle Earth) and posted the press release yesterday. He points out a few factoids that are near and dear to my interest in open source and open standards, which are worth your while to consider.

Google help[ed] fund us to do KML/KMZ support through WMS. James MacGill, of GeoTools, was the one who helped make it happen within Google, but the management is excited by supporting an open ecosystem around Google Earth. They have no direct use for it themselves, but wanted to make life easier on people looking to expose data on Google Earth, and instead of writing their own network link software from scratch it made sense to just fund an existing, solid open source server. I personally am often quite hesitant to support standards like KML that are less than completely open, but I got behind this because any user who puts up their data for Google Earth with GeoServer also makes it available as WMS and WFS, since GeoServer is 'standard by default'.

James MacGill, recently left Penn State for Google. The folks at Penn State assured me that'd mean good things and they were right. The choice of Google to support an open source/open standards project to support KML is indeed interesting. GeoServer is OGC's reference implementation for the WFS (Web Feature Service) specification.

Update: Is there a parallel here? "Microsoft will sponsor an open-source project to create a converter between Open Office XML and OpenDocument file formats."

- via C|Net