[...] > There is this cultural pressure on "standards" to be marketing tools. > Because of the government and military context for GIS, this pressure > is particularly intense for us. It starts to loop back on itself somewhat > like this, http://frot.org/on_standards/statements.html
Jo, Thanks for sharing the standards statements. Coming back to spatial - it is a natural tendency for spatial data to come full circle because allegedly (to this day I could not really prove this with my own bodily sense organs) we are living on a ball. This creates a natural need to overlap, overlay, unify, reuse and intersect its virtual representations. Something much less natural to a written text (for a start we could try to intersect an ODT with the latest ROA definition with a SOA definition rendered in a DOCX and overlay them with a WSDL schema to extract the OGC reference model) Hehe. > This does have a countereffect on innovation in software and it also > probably does prevent "bona fide" standards developing in a natural way. As > well as creating this terrific and largely justified backlash against some > of the in-a-vacuum work done by OGC, ISO. (GeoDRM anyone) Yes - this is of utmost pain to me. Geospatial Restriction Management puts the fences that we left behind in the real world when we moved to virtual right back. And DRM is intensely tied to data that is only accessible with one software - the one that exclusively implements the restricted access. This software needs legal protection because all technical protection is always utterly worthless (thank Dog or whoever else signs responsible). Hence the OGC *idea* must cringe and writhe in pain when only addressing RM. The consortium seems to be taking it all right, but that is only the worldly instance of the idea itself. > However the process of working things out by rough consensus and running > code takes longer, business process says, "first to market -> "natural > monopoly| de facto standard". I would like to add here that there might also be a natural need for de jure standards - which brings us back to governments adopting standards. Unfortunately we (humanity at large) are still so violently egoistic, self centered, illiterate and uncivilized that there seems to be a need for legal frameworks (consented - this is becoming a little broad...). What it boils down to is that this creates a need for a stable, legal framework - and I'd rather have it based on open formats instead of depending on a certain software (regardless of whether it can be hacked or not). The solution is to clearly separate data from software and model the data in a fashion that makes it accessible. Did I day this before? Maybe I did. Best regards, _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss