I was pleased to see this post on the Google Earth Blog, it is very encouraging to see Brian quoting the benefits of World Wind, and wanting better kml support in World Wind.
If anyone at Google reads this I do have a suggestion for improving kml support in WW .Net, maybe donate us a developer for a few days, this is an OS project so I’m sure any good code would be accepted, and this would promote a great deal of good will between the OS community and Google. An alternative would be to donate some money to FEF so we can hire a developer who already knows the WW codebase.
From Franks post –
An interesting discussion was held on Wednesday between Patrick Hogan of NASA’s World Wind (WW) project and Brian McClendon who is Director of Engineering for Google’s Earth and Maps projects. The discussion mostly centered around interoperability of data using KML. NASA currently has left support for KML to be done as an add-on for WW and it has limited functionality. Brian asked why they don’t support KML officially. Patrick’s response was interesting. He indicated they are supporting open standard interfaces such as WMS and WFS. Patrick indicated they would like to see KML made a standard. Brian indicated Google is considering putting KML up as a standard, but the standards process has a tendency to damper innovation and Google feels the virtual globe applications are evolving too rapidly to be constrained by a standards process at this stage. Brian also pointed out that WW needs interoperability with more datasets (i.e. KML) if it wants to gain users. Someone from a university setting asked Brian what to do if they needed functionality not available in either GE or WW. Brian immediately pointed out that since WW is open source, they certainly could turn to WW to implement new functionality. In fact, he made it clear GE is designed to support a broad audience and is necessarily restricted in its ability to be customized and that WW serves a valuable role for those situations requiring customization or non-Earth applications. In my opinion, this was a healthy discussion. Although, I believe NASA WW and Google GE people need to sit down and discuss interoperability more thoroughly.
EDIT : After talking with Patrick it seems he was promoting WCS vs KML and not WFS.
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