Frustrations documented in a couple days of posts ending with:

http://schwehr.org/blog/archives/2009-07.html#e2009-07-28T14_12_02.txt

So I’ve got feeds, but even though they validate, I don’t think they are right.

Now if I want to share properly documented topo or bathy, I have to dive into the world of Collada, BAGs (bathymetry attributed grids), opendap, etc or get lost in the land of proprietary file formats. For some of us how the data was processed and what the uncertainty values are is almost as important as the actually data.

So @Frank – I agree with your ending sentiment. There won’t be “one format to rule them all”, but instead what’s working is linking between formats. Consumers can choose if they want the HTML version for a human browser, or the KML for 3D browsing, or the GML/Shapefile/Spatialite for some GIS analysis.

thanks for the thoughts, and keep them coming! I’ll make sure and share the outcome presentation and feedback from GeoWeb.

If you would ask me honest and personally, I think GML will still live on for a long time, but it will be mostly used for specific formats / application schemas, like CityGML, OS MasterMap, etc. It will never take the role shapefiles (still) have right now, because everyone will let his GML writer output a slightly different flavor, and dealing with all those cases is a too high barrier for most people (cost and time).

On the other hand, GML is too loosely defined to easily develop tools that work with *all* kinds of GML. And I get headaches every time I have to read an OGC standard to implement it. Any geo-standard that is longer than 5 pages deserves being thrown into the garbage bin.

GML has certainly its use, but it is not always the right tool (exchange format) for the right job.

There is definitely a ways to go, but the problem is that it is often not clear what would work well upfront, and even if you find something that works well in one case, it doesn’t work well in another case (if at all).

At least I don’t think the goal is to have one unifying format, but we’ll end up with multiple (smaller) formats instead, each which should do their specific job well. The internet and the Geoweb are no monoliths, so neither are the standards which drive them.

I agree that these formats each have issues, yet are the most closely aligned with the Web, rather than a file just served off the web.

One particularly, potentially interesting format that’s being overlooked is OpenStreetMap. I’m impressed with the linkedgeodata.org and the 3 Billion triples.

Unfortunately we still have a ways to go both in providing useful, usable, expressive formats, and moving tools and data providers to using these formats.