A number of us have this same sort of conversation in the past, but we've never
come up with anything that satisifies all concerned... Perhaps a
BOF/Summit/Thingie at the conference in September to talk about this?
-mpg
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeroen
Ticheler
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 2:12 PM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGEO & OGC spec development
Hi all,
Last week I attended the Open Geospatial Consortium Technical Committee
(OGC-TC) meeting in Paris.
For those not to familiar with this meeting, it consists of a series of
Working Group (WG) meetings that mostly run around the development of
specifications (or standards if you wish) dealing with geo-informatics. The
most prominent specifications coming from OGC are Web Map Service (WMS), Web
Feature Service (WFS) and Geographic Markup Language (GML). There's a whole
list of other specs available or under development. OSGEO projects work with a
substantial number of them. See http://www.opengeospatial org for more details.
With this email I would like to touch upon two issues that I think are
relevant to OSGEO. I hope bringing this up can trigger some discussion on how
OSGEO would best benefit from the OGC spec development process:
1- Discussions related to Google's KML and Web Map Context
2- Discussions related to a Tiled Web Map Service specifications
There was discussion on the possibility that KML becomes an OGC
specification and, more importantly, that it could be used to replace the
wining Web Map Context (WMC) specification. A number of OSGEO projects use the
Styled Layer Descriptors (SLD (symbology)) specification and the WMC. There's a
great deal of overlap between these and KML. It is likely in the interest of
these projects to share their experience with OGC and see some of that
reflected in future OGC specs.
There was also discussion about a new Tiled WMS specification. Such
spec can have different forms, and could be conceived as a new spec or as an
extension (or application profile) of a Web Map Service. Two approaches were
presented and two other approaches were mentioned, among which the approach
taken within the OSGEO community.
Observing these discussions, my impression is that OSGEO has an
important role to play in the further development of these OGC specs. We can
obviously take the easy route and let OGC go its way. We could than come up
with in-house, open specifications that will compete with OGC specs still under
development. The development of the specs is likely to be quicker than going
through OGC. However, I feel that with limited effort by the community we can
have a very positive influence on the OGC spec development. We can make sure
experiences in OSGEO are reflected in the OGC specs. The WMS-T is an obvious
example of this. It was kind of frustrating to not see that experience properly
represented at the WMS-WG.
OSGEO is very young still, so frustration is not an expression of
dissatisfaction in this case :-) rather, I think it might be time to establish
a way to formally represent OSGEO in OGC. This could be through those OSGEO
members that already hold a TC level membership to OGC (the logical first step
I would think) and later possibly through a direct OSGEO TC Membership to OGC.
Also, we could consider a focal point in OSGEO where specification development
is discussed and coordinated. This may have the form of a Committee for
instance. I'm hesitant to propose new Committees, but if there's enough
interest to have a central coordination point dealing with standards and specs,
it may make sense :-)
Greetings from Rome,
Jeroen
_______________________
Jeroen Ticheler
FAO-UN
Tel: +39 06 57056041
http://www.fao.org/geonetwork
42.07420°N 12.34343°E
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