KML 3 – Allowing the Qualitative GeoWeb to also become Quantitative

Andrew Turner has a great series of blog posts on the future of KML that were the product of meetings at the OGC on the topic a week or so ago. Lots of interesting content in Andrew’s series, but the one most near and dear to us is the discussion on metadata. Chris made it out to the meeting with Andrew to throw our 2 cents into the discussion, and convey Chris’s thoughts on the schema tag and how attributed data can be embedded into it. We should not confuse adding attribute data to KML to adding metadata to KML as Sean Gillies points out in response to Andrew’s post. Both are important but serve two different and distinct functions.

Our use of the schema tag is to allow additional data to be added to KML to describe a location on the map. Natively KML supports the ability to add a description and Z coordinate to a location. So, you can describe a push pin with text, HTML and/or a picture then add a Z coordinate that provides a metric to that push pin. This allows you to do many things and has created a lot of great KML, but there are limits. Namely you can only really add two attributes – a description and a metric. Lots of locations descriptions and data in general is multi dimensional.

Lets take a simple example of one of the first Google “My Maps” mashups of the 2004 US Presidential Election. The election mashup is a nice thematic map of Bush (red states) versus Kerry votes (blue states), and when you click on a state it shows you the percent of votes for each candidate. The data on the percentage of votes for Bush and Kerry is placed in the description field of the KML requiring the user to color code each state to create the thematic map. This is quite a bit of work since your are using a qualitative data field to try and do something quantitative.

This is something we would like to change, by making it a lot easier for anyone to create KML that easily handles quantitative data. The geoweb, to date, has done a great job of opening up mapping by allowing anyone to create a qualitative description (text, HTML, pictures) of a location. This is what KML is currently geared to support, but there are an increasing number of people that would like to expand quantitative data beyond a single Z attribute.

In his post Andrew pointed to our use of the schema tag to enable thematic mapping, and that is accurate, but only the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. Once you have access to multiple data descriptors about a location it enables a range of decision making tools. KML currently reflects the “read – write” functionality of Web 2.0, but in order to evolve to a “read-write-execute” web it will need the ability to support quantitative functions that allows users to be enabled by decision support.

Since things are always clearer with examples and our favorite example is finding bars and single (men/women) let me give it a shot. Currently we would search for bars and get back KML that describes the bar – name, address, user comments, maybe a user rating. The KML and current applications cover this very well – we can “read” and “write” back to the KML – very Web 2.0. What is missing is any analysis of those bars that tell me the best one to go to.

Lets say the application already knows a few things about me – I am a 33 years old, single, male, work in IT, and I am a Taurus. This information and much more could be easily picked up from a social network profile like Facebook or MySpace. If I now did a search on bars and the KML had embedded feature attribute data for the bars and the surrounding contextual data I could be directed to the bars that had the highest correlation with women that are single, in an adjacent age bracket, and work in IT. If I had a good experience at the bar I could post back my comment to the bar further reinforcing that quantitative correlation with user generated validation. Now my KML has enabled a “read-write-execute” application that is both qualitative and quantitative. That I believe is the long term value proposition for KML 3.0.