call for presentations at the Data Model sessions in Cambridge , September 2007

[Doug Tody]

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.

	- Doug