OGC Mass Market working group discussion from Darmstadt
In keeping with my history of trying to shed some external perspective on how the OGC works, such as live-blogging the OWS-5 kickoff,
Geospatial search summit, and Google’s libkml anouncement – I thought it would be interesting to cover the OGC Mass Market working group telecon that’s being held in Darmstadt, Germany.
OpenSearch-Geo
Pedro Goncalves presented his work taking the OpenSearch-Geo specification and forming into an OGC acceptable document. Pedro has been doing great work extending OpenSearch-Geo for accessing earth observation data. I also talked about how OGC services could be described within OpenSearch templating over a year ago in Atlanta.
Unfortunately the presentation and document is currently locked away behind OGC’s portal. Hopefully Pedro will release it publicly. In addition, it’s not clear within the OGC how to adopt such as suggested standard. It’s not part of the OGC and must go through various OGC architecture boards and discussions to be accepted potentaill as a whitepaper.
We wrote OpenSearch-Geo at WhereCamp 2007 and since then it has stayed as a draft standard with various uptake across projects. The adoption as a more formalized standard should have a very positive effect on its adoption.
GeoCommons supports 3 OpenSearch description documents, one each for Finder, Maker, and all of GeoCommons.
In the end, Pedro’s paper was accepted as a “discussion paper”. Hopefully we can push this forward at the next Technical Committee meeting in Mountain View in December – where DeWitt Clinton (OpenSearch original author) will hopefully pop in to push it forward.
The rest of the working group meeting discussed a potential GeoSMS format that ITRI from Taiwan is working on.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to talking about the potential <geomap> HTML element ideas. There will be more discussion about that on the OGC Mass Market email list.
My name is
September 30th, 2009 at 11:08 am (#)
I got kicked out of the Ottawa meeting for blogging about the Mass Market Working Group (in particular the early discussions of KML standardization). Turns out, it’s against the rules to publish pre-publication (not standards or white papers or draft standards or draft white papers or basically some kind of official document) information.
September 30th, 2009 at 9:18 pm (#)
My advice to anyone presenting info at OGC: put a Creative Commons license on your presentation *before* you go. Then you can post your work anywhere. Presenting at OGC can otherwise become a total black hole.