Mr. Ron Lake started work on GML in the fall of 1998, following earlier work on XML
encodings for radio broadcasting. Mr. Lake presented his early ideas to an OGC meeting in Atlanta,
Georgia, in February 1999, under the title xGML. This introduced the idea of a GeoDOM, and the notion
of Geographic Styling Language (GSL) based on XSL. Mr. Akifumi Nakai of NTT Data also presented
at the same meeting on work partly underway at NTT Data on an XML encoding called G-XML,
which was targeted at location-based services. In April 1999, Galdos created the XBed team (
with CubeWerx, Oracle, MapInfo, NTT Data NTT Data, Mitsubishi, and Compusult as subcontractors).
Xbed was focused on the use of XML for geospatial. This led to the creation of SFXML (Simple Features XML)
with input from Galdos, US Census, and NTT Data. Galdos demonstrated an early map style engine pulling
data from an Oracle-based "GML" data server (precursor of the WFS) at the first OGC Web Map Test Bed
in September 1999. In October 1999, Galdos Systems rewrote the SFXML draft document into a
Request for Comment, and changed the name of the language to GML (Geography Markup Language).
