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| Subject: | GISList: RE: OGC and Standards, - a response |
| Date: |
12/11/2002 03:57:38 PM |
| From: |
<creediii .. mindspring.com> |
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Anthony,
While I certainly appreciate the time you have taken to “look at” the “issue”
of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC), I want to suggest that you’ve not done your
homework as well as you might have.
First off, let’s discuss our membership. You are quite correct that some of
our members are the traditional GIS vendors. However, probably 80% are not!
The really good news is that more and more new members are coming from other
communities of use – location-based services, telecommunications, and local
government. Universities have become more and more active. At our last
demonstration, highlighting interfaces developed in OGC Web Services
Initiative, Phase 1.2, both George Mason University and the University of
Alabama Huntsville participated. Among the GIS vendors, after the “household
names” of GIS (Intergraph, ESRI, MapInfo, and Autodesk) there are dozens of
what I might call non-traditional suppliers of geospatial technology, sleek
players (including Galdos, IONIC, Cadcorp, Polexis, Social Change Online, Dawn
Corp, CubeWerx, and Compusult) that see OpenGIS specifications as a key part
of their business process and software development plans. Other members
include key geospatial stakeholders, such as: FGDC, US Census, US EPA, UK
Ordnance Survey, US DOT, US FEMA, ERDC (Corp of Engineers), City of San
Francisco, Natural Resources Canada, GeoSciences Australia, and Northrhine
Westfalia (Germany). Please let me know of any other players whom you think
should have a role in the OGC process.
Why do these members join and spend valuable time working in our process? They
achieve significant benefit in terms of their growth in the market place,
networking with other OGC members, return on investment, and/or achievement of
business objectives. To put it bluntly, open specifications make their jobs
easier and increase return on investment. While OGC began with an ideological
vision, it’s tied into a business model for members and the organization.
More importantly, this process results in a diversity of plug and play
technology offerings in the marketplace – take minute to review the
Implementing Products listing on the www.opengis.org website.
One aspect that our members find particularly valuable: our commitment to
protecting both their corporate Intellectual Property Rights and the
specifications developed by the membership. We never ask members to include
their proprietary technology in specifications. And, we are the defenders of
the OGC’s Intellectual Property. Among other things, we police all claims of
conformance that are brought to our attention.
As the number of the products that implement OpenGIS specifications grows,
more and more procurements are requiring adherence to standards and
specifications that support and promote interoperability of geospatial data,
services, and applications. That, our members will tell you, increases the
number and value of prospects for new business opportunity and revenue
generation. . There is another set of relationships that both validates and
increases the value of our work. The OGC has bilateral agreements with other
standards and specification organizations, such as ISO (the International
Standards Organization). The upshot: the content of various OGC specifications
are becoming either international standards or are included as part of other
specifications, such as the Mobile Location Platform API.
Second, let’s have a look at those “hefty fees for the ‘privilege’ to
participate in an ‘Open’ GIS Consortium." Perhaps it’s news to you, but there
are many other standards and specifications organizations (including the W3C
that sets standards for the Web) that charge membership fees. Have you looked
into their fees? OMA, OMG, OASIS, W3C and many others charge higher membership
fees. Running a standards organization does not come cheap, but the returns
can be considerable - look at the Web as an example!
While members do have certain privileges that non-members do not, OGC makes a
great deal of its ongoing specification work available to the public for
comment very early in our process. Moreover, all approved OGC specifications
are freely available to ALL developers of GIS and other software, worldwide.
That means that even if a software development firm never pays a cent to OGC,
it can implement any OGC specification. There are no associated royalty fees.
This free and open, unrestricted access to OGC specifications is especially
valuable to both commercial software providers as well open source software
providers, several of whom have implemented OpenGIS Specifications in their
offerings.
Third, I want to address what I consider the most misleading statement you
made: “So, by default, it is yet another expensive vehicle for the major
vendors to leverage their products and solidify their strangle hold on the
market, only with an added endorsement by OGC."
While some of the major players in
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