Google will be releasing an open-source KML library in C++ that implements and tracks the standard as it progresses. By providing a reference library it allows developers to more easily keep up to date with KML without having to maintain their own library and track standards changes.

likely apache licensed. i’ll hold off for that to come out to do more gdata experiments.

Our hope is that libkml will reduce the need for everyone to re-invent the wheel with a custom parser or serializer, by providing a single re-usable library that implements KML’s semantics. This first release is focused primarily on the low-level details of the KML DOM itself, but it’s our intent to enhance the library in the future by implementing more sophisticated operations like style resolution and balloon text templating.