After a little less than a year of great work by the KML SWG, we have a standard! The OGC press release gives some facts and a link to the OGC KML 2.2 Standard, and John Timmer at ars technica has a nice piece on the significance of this step. His article won’t offer anything new for geo industry veterans, but 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!