-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sean Gillies
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 10:24 AM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGEO & OGC spec development
Michael,
Standards bodies are a good thing if they produce good standards.
OGC standards tend toward fussy intricacy (compare WFS-T to the Atom
Publishing Protocol) and pointless abstraction (all the so-called
distributed computing platforms that no one uses). I don't
know why, but
I suspect that it's cultural (no, I don't mean Canadian
culture). Going
public has the potential to reform the culture of the OGC.
Regards,
Sean
Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
FYI, later this week at the GeoWeb conference in Vancouver
we're having a discussion on this hot topic:
Ever wonder why we need standards bodies? Can we just do
it with a Wiki?
We have open source, why not open source open standards?
What about intellectual
property protection? Can I afford to belong to a
standards body? Can I afford
not to? Do standards bodies impede or drive innovation?
How should neo-geo and
OGC work together? What are the pitfalls of "going public"?
I'll be on the panel, as will Carl Reed from OGC.
(Feel free to send me any comments/positions you'd like me
to put forward.)
-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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