In the OGC Mass Market Geo Working Group meeting yesterday, I presented the preliminary findings of the group brainstorming about the future of KML in the OWS-5 testbed. Most of what was discussed isn’t ready for prime time, so I’ll wait to talk about for a few months, but one critical point that everyone should understand is that KML is, always has been, and will continue to be about mapping/geospatial visualization. Don’t use KML as a data storage or archival format. That’s what GML is for. Yes, KML has some geographic coordinates in there, but KML’s ability to act like a GIS format–attaching other data properties to the geography, typing them, and putting metadata on it all–is weak.

The right way to think about the geographic information “workflow” is to have a spatial database that serves up data to the Web via the Web Feature Service (WFS) API in some flavor of GML. Soon, OGC will specify how that WFS should serve up KML using the existing WFS API plus some extra information to describe the transformation–probably using SLD. The authoritative data will still reside in the spatial database. The KML will just represent one cartographic view of the data at a particular point in time.