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A roundup:
Martin Daly
http://blog.lostinspatial.com/2008/04/15/the-kml-kargo-kult/
"About a year ago I was on a panel at a Geobrowsers workshop. I said then that KML was not so special when the K still stood for Keyhole. I don’t think that it has been made more special than it already was by making the K stand for OGC."
Raj Singh (who works for OGC):
http://www.rajsingh.org/blog/2008/04/15/kml-now-an-ogc-open-standard/
"...it’s great to see the mainstream IT media “get it” when it comes to our technologies and markets.
This is hopefully a big win for individuals who contribute data to one site, and would like to use it in many others — not to mention the companies whose business model revolves around these altruistic, bottom-up data providers. One small step for OGC, and one big step towards breaking down data silos!"
Matt Giger
http://blog.earthbrowser.com/2008/04/kml-libkml-and-standard-mistake.html
"Passing off KML to the OGC so it could become a "standard" was a big mistake for Google."
KML is ab-so-lute-ly wretched as a rendering format; too many KML's locally and you need major horsepower to drive the view. So a wider adoption of KML will drag the performance of Google clients into ESRI-like rendering speeds...which renders the advantages of the thin client moot.
The difference between them that makes GE important is its data quality. Google's data licensing agreements limit access to its streams to the GE client, but there is no reason the GE client should not have access to other streams using an open standard; and there are good reasons for other specialized virtual globe clients to share standard protocols for specialized geospatial data streams. Google's most useful contribution to OGC would be a standard for geospatial tiling and network streaming that's more useful than WMS and HTTP.
OGC KML is all about "encoding representations of geographic data for display in an earth browser". The keywords are representations and display. For interoperability of richer 3D data and services, the OGC membership is continuing work towards adoption of new standards (i.e. CityGML) and extensions of current standards to enable functions such as indoor LBS, emergency response, and infrastructure management. KML is wonderful for simple geometric modeling and portrayal, but other standards are needed for building information models. Our partnerships with the IAI for IFC and the Web3D Consortium for X3D are part of the emerging solution.
Tim Case