Keyhole Markup Language (KML)

Definition - What does Keyhole Markup Language (KML) mean?

Keyhole markup language (KML) is a markup language based on XML that is useful for describing and implementing geographic annotation and visualizations on HTML-based browsers, 2-D maps and 3-D earth browsers.

KML was initially developed for Google Earth. The technology was created by Keyhole Inc., which was purchased by Google in 2004.

Techopedia explains Keyhole Markup Language (KML)

Google Earth, Maps and Moible - along with other geobrowsers - use the KML file format, which specifies many features that suit those types of applications. For instance, KML includes features like place marks, 3-D models, text descriptions, images, polygon shapes and other graphical features.

A camera view is associated with multiple data types like heading, altitude and tilt. KML shares a number of symbols with geography markup language (GML), another XML-based markup language used to describe geographic features.

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