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Posted by Paul Cooper on August 3, 2006, 11:37 am
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>Luca -
>
>FYI, Google did not entirely write their application suite. They have a
>number of partners (content and software technology) upon which
>GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth are built. The geocoding, navigation, and
>routing engine is from companies such as deCarta (formerly TelContar)
>http://www10.giscafe.com/nbc/articles/view_weekly.php?run_date=21-Feb-2005.
>Google purchased Keyhole for their 3D visualization technology
>(GoogleEarth) and most recently purchased SketchUp
>(http://sketchup.google.com/).
>
>Recently, Google joined the OGC as a high-level member. Google
>definitely does care about the effective and proper use of standards.
>For example, Google Earth EC supports an integrated WMS server. Then
>there are dozens of applications/implementations in which organizations
>or individual engineers have integrated GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth with
>WMS, WFS, and other OGC standards. There are also GML to KML and KML to
>GML tools. Some of these are open source and others are commercial.
>Most are now in production use.
>
>Regards
>
>Carl
>
Just to back this up, I heard a talk by Ron Lake (Mr GML!) at a
meeting of ISO TC211 comparing KML and GML. Philosophically they are
rather different as GML is a content transfer mechanism, and as a
matter of principle does not provide rendering information; that is
the job of other standards such as SLD. KML provides both data and
rendering information. Furthermore, KML has no mechanism for
specifying the coordinate system in use (it assumes it is always the
same). However, it is relatively straightforward to render GML into
KML, as there is sufficient similarity in the data models for this to
work. KML is not really suitable for transfer of information between
GIS software packages, but it is fine for a visualization package such
as Google Earth.
Paul
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