On Tue, 28 Aug 2007, Alasdair Allan wrote:
> I was suggesting adopting KML for KML type
> scenarios inside the VO, and not going out and reinventing the wheel. For
> instance, for visualisation purposes KML is an excellent alternative return
> from something like Cone Search or Simple Time Access Protocol (STAP) or its
> eventual replacement Simple Event Access Protocol (SEAP).
I certainly agree with this (VO should not reinvent a visualization markup language such as KML), however it is not yet an open standard, and there are related things out there such as GML (geography markup language), which appear similar in some respects. I suspect though that with KML moving to OpenGIS, the standards issue will eventually be solved, so your point is a good one.
For purposes of visualizing the sky, with various surveys represented as layers, catalog objects as markers, etc., the GIS technology (Google Sky and others) does look very interesting - a potential killer app for interactively visualizing Terabytes of multiband graphical astronomy data in a global sense. This could be especially powerful if we control the data delivery (related GIS services) within astronomy, but can tap into these public tools for generic display capabilities. I believe KML also has capabilities to call external web services, so the basic capability for a powerful graphical front-end appears to already be there - once the open standards catch up.
So I guess I agree. So long as KML is proprietary technology I don't think it should be adopted as an IVOA standard, but it is probably heading where we want to go in terms of Web-based visualization.