KML (formerly Keyhole Markup Language) is a technology that Google puts their weight behind in an attempt to create an open standard for expressing geographic annotation and visualization. Well, on April 13th, the Open Geospatial Consortium, announced that OGC Approves KML as Open Standard.

Open standards are fantastic and will help to ’spur on’ innovation and produce a large amount of geographic annotations. What will we see coming down the pipe? Expect to see a bunch of smaller providers create niche KML files. Examples: real estate agents might produce a KML for their area of expertise, wilderness tour companies creating KML files for their routes, and don’t forget wineries producing KML files of all their vineyards.

Larger companies with huge untapped collections of geospatial data now have a method to share/sell their data with web companies. The big question is how will they monetize this data? KML files are, ultimately, a great way to share geospatial data but as soon as you share it or sell it, nothing stops someone from sharing it with the world.

Web mashups are going to become bigger than ever as more KML files are created. Just think of a world where startups spend time building apps to make data more useful instead of scraping the same data over and over again.

This entry was posted Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Technology, Trends. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.