RE OGC and Zen :-)

Interesting the mention of the OGC and bolting things on and losing the Zen.

Well, this has been a vigorous topic of discussion by the members of the newly constituted OGC Architecture Board. There is an interesting tension in geospatial standards development arena that has to be recognized. On one side there are the major mapping organizations (NGA, Ordnance Survey, Dutch Cadastre, etc) that have a set of requirements for expressing and exchanging (in an interoperable way) highly complex and semantically rich content, often in mission critical or business critical situations. They also need the service interfaces that support this environment. On the other side is what we call the consumer/mass market in which expressive but lightweight and easy to implement encodings and interfaces are required. Developers in this latter environment do not (at least for now) care about coordinate reference systems, the ability to express "traditional" geo-metadata, extensibility (at least not yet), and so forth. But as we all know, developers have a knack to ask for more capability as they gain more implementation experience. So this tension between "traditional" geo and web 2.0 geo is not just in the OGC. We have seen similar tension in the GeoRSS discussions, in OSGeo, and in other forums.

Are the two sets of requirements mutually exclusive? The OAB members do not think so. And I believe that this group does not think so either.

As an example, the OGC Web Map Service Interface Spec is an interface standard that bridges both worlds. GeoRSS is another example. 

My morning missive - too much coffee.

Regards

Carl Reed, PhD
CTO and Executive Director Specification Program
OGC

The OGC: Helping the World to Communicate Geographically

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