- From: Sara Yurman <syurman@spatialfocus.com>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 13:28:42 -0400
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
- CC: mlombard@spatialfocus.com
I am writing to express my opposition to RAND. I will not repeat the excellent arguments that Alan Cox made. He makes them far better than I could. I will, however, tell you briefly about how it would affect our small business. We work with local governments in the U.S. to help them straighten out their street addresses. Most local governments here can only locate roughly 65% of their addresses. It means, bluntly, that the ambulance is late for the other 35%. We help fix this problem, and keep it fixed. It is not glamourous work. It involves tracking down all the ways the people, the data, the software and the workflow do not work together, and fixing all of it. Ultimately, however, it saves lives. Our ability to operate effectively depends directly on open standards of all kinds. We depend on it for communications, for information, for the interoperability that makes our work possible. Simple, open, free, interoperable technologies make it possible for us to make sense of the data that comes from the disparate systems we find in each jurisdiction. We had been looking towards the development of SVG and GML (geographic markup language) to help us de-balkanize mapped information even further. Please remember the importance of things like emergency services when you think about RAND. Sara Yurman
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 13:46:30 UTC