7 November 2014. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has announced that the OGC Members approved the KML 2.2 validator as part of the official OGC Compliance Testing Facility. The validator tests whether implementations are correctly publishing KML data. The validator tests KML and KMZ files, located locally or available via a URL.
KML is an XML language focused on geographic visualization, including annotation of maps and images. KML is supported in numerous Earth browser applications and geospatial software products. About 70 KML 2.2 implementations are registered in the OGC implementations database. In early 2010, Google submitted KML to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to be maintained and evolved within the OGC consensus process.
The test suite is based on the KML Abstract Test Suite [2] and is structured in 3 levels:
- Level 1 – includes test cases covering requirements that must be satisfied by a minimally conformant KML document;
- Level 2 – same as Level 1, plus test cases addressing recommended constraints;
- Level 3 – same as Level 2, plus test cases covering suggested constraints that are informative in nature.
Organizations can test their KML instances (KML or KMZ) at no cost at the OGC Testing Facility. If an organization's implementation successfully passes the KML test, then the organization can receive OGC certification for their KML implementation by following a simple procedure.
The OGC acknowledges the support of Even Rouault for developing the reference implementation GDAL libkml and the support of Richard Martell from Galdos for developing the test suite.
The OGC® is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 495 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.
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