As reported by the Google LatLong Blog, KML has now officially become an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard.
According to Google, there are tens of millions of KML documents available online, hosted on over 100,000 unique domain names. The number of files isn’t a huge surprise, but 100,000 unique domains seem like a ton!
As part of this, Google has transferred ownership of the standard to the OGC. To quote Google:
This transfer of ownership is a strong reflection of Google’s commitment to open standards. Fundamentally, our interest is not to control information, but rather to encourage its spread.
Microsoft started adding support for KML last October
, so getting KML accepted as a standard is another step toward making it the ubiquitous mapping standard on the web.
