Bryce et al, Interesting observations, and I'm not certain that the remarks that follow address the central question for the GeoTools project, since the community of 'newcomers' to ISO standards is large and I'm more in tune with the end users. With that in mind...
I was in NC last week for the always excellent NC GIS Conference and talked to many folks in state and local governments about standards. I want to know specifically how we can take advantage of the good work taking place at state/local levels and apply it to the development of ANSI and ISO standards related to geospatial information. It's clear from my conversations that these widely dispersed and highly local communities have little, if any, insight in to the standards development process. Moreover, awareness and adoption of ISO 19110-series standards is hindered by the dearth of good toolsets for creating standards profiles. For example, I'm not aware of any materials that would instruct local government users on how to create a profile of an existing standard other than the ISO FAQ (http://old.jtc1sc36.org/doc/36N0312.pdf). Tools that make standards usable can broaden awareness of the standards, and in that sense, disperse the standards in a more cost-effective manner. Perhaps there is room for a chapter on creating profiles in that O'Reilly book... :) Secondly, the recent development of GeoRSS shows that web-based, open source processes work well for standards development. Interestingly, OGC has established a 'mass market' committee to address geospatial standards that arise outside of the traditional standard setting organizations. FGDC also has a policy on compliance with non-Federal standards. I'm not familiar with the ISO reports. I've seen the Factsheets for the standards, but they seem fairly limited in scope and formal in tone. A few years ago Dr. John Evans led the development of a Geospatial Interoperability Reference Model (GIRM - http://gai.fgdc.gov/girm/). Although it's getting a little long in the tooth, to my mind it's still the best intro out there on the landscape of the standards stack and the modularity you refer to. Last year, I asked John if he had plans to update the model but at the time, he did not. Perhaps that's something GeoTools might want to build upon? My $00.02 and I welcome others to add theirs. SEJ ___________________________________ Steven E. Johnson Booz Allen Hamilton http://www.boozallen.com É 703.902.5149 voice Ê 703.902.3613 fax - [EMAIL PROTECTED] þ 38 55 19.89 N / 077 13 55.45 W ë USNG Coordinate: 18SUJ0650010511 -----Original Message----- From: Bryce L Nordgren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 3:04 PM To: Andrea Aime; Johnson, Steven E Cc: Chris Holmes; Geotools-Devel list; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Justin Deoliveira; McQueen, Joshua; Fox, Thomas P; Brill, Gregory A.; Cole, Deborah; Andersen, Norman C. Subject: ISO Modular Standards & Cost Efficiency Andrea & GeoTools developers, I'm including a number of people from the US Technical Advisory Group to ISO TC/211 in this email, particularly the ones interested in "outreach". Believe it or not, that's a big thing right now, at least for the US contingent. Bearing in mind that no one here has the power to get ISO to stop charging for standards, and that the 19100 family is now and will forever be highly modular (i.e. interrelated), we'd be interested in hearing any constructive suggestions about how the concepts and content of the standards could be disseminated at an appropriate level in a more cost effective manner. Please feel free to respond even if you're not from the US. :) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 03/07/2007 06:25:49 AM: > Warning, personal opinion here. If I'll ever have to work with ISO > something, and be paid to do so, I'll buy the relevant ISO standard. > > Yet, I'm not sure an organisation that makes "for buy" standards > deserves open source implementations of them. > > If we were to start copying with ISO seriously, we would end up using > so many inter-related standards that each one of us would have to pay > 1000$, not 30. That's totally unacceptable to me. > I'm not asking a dime to people downloading the stuff I did develop in > my own spare time. Oh boy do I understand that! ($800 and counting) However, there's a couple of factors which force us in this direction whether we like it or not: 1] GML3 (free/OGC) encodes time using the data model in 19108 (not free/ISO). 2] GML3 (free) provides only an encoding and does not provide much in the way of "explanatory text" or legal values (but is still 600 pages long). Also, observe that C++ is an ISO standard. Is any open source software written in C++? (yes) Are there any open-source implementations of the c++ language? (yes) Is it common practice to learn about the C++ standard template library by buying the ISO standard? (no) As to the problem of users not knowing how to use an ISO-based library without buying ISO standards: There is a difference in the level of knowledge required by an implementor and the level required by a user of a library. By and large, users never need to see standards or know algorithms. They just need a decent grasp of the rules which ultimately derive from the standard. What we need is an O'Reilly "ISO GIS in a Nutshell" book. I don't believe that ISO (or ANSI or OGC) would publish a "Nutshell" book, but there are at least two things we may be able to look into in order to ease the pain of newcomers, and I'd like to hear your opinions about them: 1] ANSI sometimes sells standards as sets for a discounted rate. What if the entire 19100 series was sold for one fixed price? Or if we made sets for Basic Geospatial Modeling using Features, Geospatial Services, Geospatial XML (not just GML), and other "topic areas"? What groupings would you like to see? What would help people get startedwith the least pain? 2] It is my understanding that ISO also produces documents which are reports, not standards. What if ISO produced one or more reports in various topic areas? These reports would be designed as summaries of the suite of standards targeted towards "users", not "implementors". These could serve as an introduction to the 45+ standards in the family, they could focus on how the standards build on each other (i.e. what tasks require what pieces from what standards) and have a much more "explanatory" style than the detail-oriented approach required by an actual standard. 3] Do we (GeoTools) want to start documenting various non-free standards in the spirit of the various primers I've written? Implementors still need to buy the standard (and will always have to do so). Users won't. Right now these are just thoughts, as I don't know exactly what we can and can't do or even what we are willing to do. Practically speaking, OGC and ISO TC/211 standards are married now and there's not a divorce in sight. So--we want to encourage adoption of these standards, you want to be able to interoperate without having ISO capitalize on your gratis implementation; how can we help each other out? Bryce ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list Geotools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
