13 Nov 2005 - GML, and KML - Why the fuss?

Various other blogs have been making comparisons between GML and KML.  Such discourse is interesting, however, I think that most of them miss the point.  Comments like KML is light and GML is heavy -  or "I was like a kid in a candy store" - are misleading at the best and  border on being disingenuous.  The difference, the key difference between GML and KML is not complexity nor expressiveness, and can be expressed in a single word - Google.  Had Google decided to use GML (and THEY DID) - we would be saying the same things about GML as KML.  This is not sour grapes - it is simply reality.  One can easily argue that KML is already a profile of GML - just unoffically so.

Of course you would not want to express avionics in KML, nor the charts for ships at sea.  The point of GML was to enable profiles on which could be constructed application vocabularies for different domains.  The rise of KML reinforces the importance of XML in the geospatial domain and in no way reduces the efficacy or importance of GML.

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