Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML standard used for expressing geographic annotation and visualisations. The KML file format is used to display and annotate geographic data in Google Earth and other applications.
Overview
KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is an xml based language for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on web-based online and mobile maps (2d) and earth browsers (3d). It originated as the save format for google-earth, but is now an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard.
In practice most data in kml form is actually stored in a kmz file, which is simply kml data compressed in the zip format.
Other References
- KML Reference
- Developer's Guide
- Getting Started with KML
- KML Tutorial - Basic and Advanced Documents
- KML Interactive Sampler
- Opengeospatial - Kml standards
Tag Usage
Consider whether the question would be more suitable on Stack Overflow SE or GIS SE.
