As part of the OGC OWS-5 work, the committee has a telecon every Tuesday afternoon. This is to ensure that progress continues throughout the 6-month project and any issues are raised early.

At this week’s telecon there was general agreement that there haven’t been too many concerns publicly raised about the current proposed KML modifications - and that in the next month the various participants would each prototype parts of KML 3 that are pertinent to their products.

For Mapufacture, we’ll be prototyping the updated KML Core, Metadata module, Service Links, and a Mobile version of KML3.

We agreed on a couple of other things as well regarding the scope of the OWS-5 effort. We won’t be addressing the possibilities of external schemas. Also, we won’t, as OWS-5, work on KML AtomPub (APP).

This doesn’t mean no one should - in fact Sean Gillies and Charlie Savage are getting together a demo interop that Mapufacture will participate in to work out APP with geo-apps, including possibly using KML as the content encoding.

No issues?

I did say there were no publicly raised issues. However, there are rumors of privately raised concerns about some of the KML concepts, especially as related to styling, by developers that have a lot of experience developing KML visualization clients.

However, despite multiple requests by individuals, and the committee, these developers, or company, have not yet shared their experience, thoughts, or concerns with the committee. This is surprising considering this company is a core part of the Agile Geography thread and has a vested interest in the future of KML.

Why they would choose to not share their insight either means they’re too busy, open to new suggestions and really want the insight of developers and users not intimately tied to a particular implementation - or that they don’t really care about the public standardization of KML and will do what they want, regardless of what OGC decides for KML.

I hope they are just waiting to see what emerges, and in the end they’ll completely support the standard. However, based on their experience and supposedly having gone down some of these roads, it would be very appreciated if they would offer their advice.

Other standards

While not within the scope of KML3 and OWS-5, the committee is somewhat participating in other working groups within the OGC - which is usually referred to as “Mass Market”. The OGC will be proposing standardizing on the proposed Geolocation in HTTP headers draft spec.

Need feedback

No one currently on the committee currently is heavily involved with 3D visualization. We would definitely welcome feedback on features, standards, supports, and use-cases you would like to see in KML for supporting models, visualization, and immersive reality. Should KML support X3D? Only Collada? Do you want to specify linking of bodies in KML?

FOSS4G

As the last item of business, we agreed that we’re going to try and get a demo together for FOSS4G of the current spec. This will mean various implementations of Metadata, Styling, Service Links to play with in your own clients and server systems.