SDI, Google Style
Looks like all the geo-rage is Google Maps’ latest announcement that they will support indexing of KML documents, so someone can search for KML documents with a bit more intelligence then adding a filetype filter.
I think this will pick up some steam, like most things Google do. Many KML docs already exist out there, and this will also motivate publishing of more KML docs.
I hope there are similar plans for GML documents, however the problem there is that many GML docs are produced from WFS interactions, which, for the most part, have to be triggered by a WFS client request, which usually is not statically published.
I also hope that there is some discussion of this in the OGC Mass Market Working Group. I remember some discussions on how this would have been great for the WMS specification to publish a static Capabilities XML document for the sake of search engines. Maybe this is a good opportunity for catalogue providers out there to write wrappers to additionally publish KML of their resources. I’ve started looking at this for owscat.
