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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | RE: GISList: OGC and Standards |
| Date: |
01/07/2003 11:20:54 AM |
| From: |
sonny |
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All,
I just don't have the time or the energy to go through all these posts, so
this will be my last one on this topic. First, I want to say that I am an
OGC member and I speak from the perspective as a member and not as OGC
representative. OK, so much for the disclaimer.
OGC is member/trade organization of over 200 organizations. As an
organization it serves its membership first and through them, possibly the
"average GIS Joe." A large number of sponsors are government organizations,
both international and USA. The government sponsors should be applauded for
having the vision and the guts to fund initiatives that promote
interoperability. They recognize that GIS systems that they have purchased
and deployed in the past form information islands and stovepipes. They are
funding interoperability initiatives to break through stovepipes and provide
geospatial data in a vendor neutral way. Users are free to choose the
software that meets their needs instead of staying with one product and
architecting all solutions around a singe vendor. This also serves their
mandate for providing data to the public.
We can all choose to see conspiracies and cabals that want to reinforce the
hegemony of the "top vendors" as decreed by Daratech and Gartner via ISS.
If you take a look at the names of authors, editors, and contributors to
specs, you will invariably find names of little known companies such as
Ionic, Cubewerx, Compusult, Galdos, etc as major contributors, primary
editors, or chairpersons of the working groups. You will also find ESRI,
Intergraph, MapInfo and whomever you decide is part of the hegemony.
As for the term "coverage," in OGC parlance it refers to a raster data set
and not an ESRI vector data set. I'm not sure how it came into being, but
I'm almost certain that it did not come from ESRI. OGC uses a lot of
acronyms and obtuse language, but that's the nature of developing specs that
don't violate trademarks and such.
In several responses there seems to be an idea that distributed geospatial
processing is something part of a dot com ponzi scheme. The requirements
for interoperability existed long before the internet boom and bust and they
still haven't been solved. In a previous life I was a system integrator
trying to build enterprise-wide systems that included GIS. I went through a
number of architectures from MS DNA (blast from the past) to CORBA. With
OGC compliant software, I know that I am closer to a maintainable and more
cost effective solution than with older information architectures. The
ability to get data by simply sending a request via http with a GETFEATURE
request is a blessing when I think about all the gyrations I did to get
spatial data from one system to another. Don't even get me started on
integrity issues.
To be honest I find Mapquest an embarrassment as to what a GIS professional
does (although I could live myself if I got 1% of what it sold for). First
the maps are ugly, the interface cartoonish and it really doesn't do much
more than it was originally programmed to do. OGC specs are about building
blocks, not complete solutions such as Mapquest. For Ionic Enterprise, we
don't want to be the next Mapquest, nor the guys the provide the $250
improved mousetrap of a GIS. We build backend and client components that
let you interface with other non-spatial information systems. We build our
components to OGC specifications because it facilitates the integration of
our components into business systems. For Ionic Enterprise, OGC compliance
is a market differentiator.
I encourage you to attend a Technical Committee meeting where you will find
working groups hashing out technical details of specifications. You will
find that there are lots of folks from multiple countries, organizations,
and vendors participating to develop specs. Are we chumps and pawns of the
cabal? Hopefully not, most us "other guys" are vendors trying to get our
section of "pie" in the next Daratech or ISS report. We are all working in
our own self interest to provide the users products that make sense and that
just work.
Sonny Parafina
Ionic Enterprise
www.ionicenterprise.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Quartararo [mailto:ajq3@spatialnetworks.com]
Sent: Monday, December 23, 2002 3:10 PM
To: gislist@geocomm.com
Subject: RE: GISList: OGC and Standards
Sonny,
Nicely articulated. However, the debate has hardly deteriorated at all,
given the sheer number of off-list emails I have received in support of not
only my comments/positions, but others of like perspective. I can only
surmise that there is a significant number of people that are
disenfranchised, disappointed, disillusioned and otherwise dismayed at the
state of the industry, in no small part due to OGC and it's sugar-daddies.
Further, I'm glad as well to see a refreshing piece of candor and frankness
from y
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