Also remember that OGC has made its Mass Market Working Group
discussion list public:
http://mail.opengeospatial.org/mailman/listinfo/mass-market-geo
This is the best way for non-members to get in on certain
discussions, particularly the ones Jeroen mentions. That allows
individuals to put forth their opinions. A unified OSGeo opinion
would certainly carry more weight, so I think it's valuable to move
that discussion forward.
---
Raj
On Jul 16, 2007, at 5:16 PM, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
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:discuss-
[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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