Keyhole Markup Language (KML), the data format used by Google Earth to annotate and view geospatial data on maps, has become an international Open Geospatial Consortium standard.
KML Best Practices for Interoperability
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Keyhole Markup Language (KML), the data format used by Google Earth™ to annotate and view geospatial data on maps, has become an international Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard and has been incorporated into numerous commercial and government systems. KML is no longer viewed as a vendor-proprietary data format but rather as an open data standard for a growing community. The increase in applications consuming and producing KML requires that best practices be established to promote interoperability. This technical report describes best practices for validating KML and for using metadata and attribution. These practices further enable the goals of interoperability and increased data sharing for situation awareness across organizations and systems.