One of my biggest problems with the OGC is the lack of a practical membership
avenue for open source projects and/or programmers. I think it would be great
if the OSGeo or some of its participating projects could serve as a vehicle
that would allow for more participation by the open source community in OGC
standard development.
The Sunburned Surveyor
________________________________
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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