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 started with 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
