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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | RE: GISList: OGC and Standards, - a response |
| Date: |
01/07/2003 11:20:54 AM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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> I have read your "essay" and I think you are being more than a
> little strident.
> There is little in much of what you say that ANYONE in OGC would debate -
> comments like
>
> "Even the fastest Internet connection is thousands of times too
> slow to support
> such sophisticated user interfaces. Remember that a processor -
> RAM connection
> is like a bullet to a walk when compared to a hard disk, and the
> hard disk is
> like a walk to a slow snail compared to Internet. Folks who make
> the technical
> mistake of thinking that Internet can support the same user
> interfaces as a
> processor - RAM connection are making as dumb a suggestion as it
> would be to
> suggest that as snail could play on a World Cup soccer team.
> Actually, it's
> worse than that. They are suggesting a snail can keep pace with a
> fast rifle
> bullet. "
>
> or
>
> "At Manifold we believe that a cool user interface written by
> experts that takes
> maximum advantage of "in the box" power will always far
> outperform a GIS over
> Internet solution written by equally smart experts. For serious
> GIS work the
> best user interfaces and the fastest, largest and most
> sophisticated spatial
> work will happen within your local workstation.
>
> Web interfaces are fine for casual use to serve up "pay per
> views" and other
> visual summaries of GIS work done in the box. Internet is fine
> for such things
> and is a good way to provide reports and pictures of one's work
> to a worldwide
> audience. That's why we have web services within Manifold: for
> such uses it's a
> great idea."
>
> Will not get much in the way of objection at the OGC - some might
> go further in
> terms of what will happen with Web Services - but you state the
> current state of
> art fairly accurately. You seem to be attacking phantoms of your
> own creation!
>
> So what is the beef ?
>
You are right. Those two quotations from the essay are indisputable,
common-sense points for most people. We don't even need to get into
speed-of-light limitations as the essay does. So you tell me why OGC
completely ignores these and many other common-sense points in what they do.
That's the beef.
I don't think the reason is that the people within OGC are stupid. I think
most of them are very smart people who know exactly what they are up to. I
think the reason that OGC as an organization ignores common sense in what
they do is that it is disadvantageous to the most influential constituencies
OGC represents: the vendors who want to protect obsolete techology (that may
have been common-sense ten years ago but no longer is) and the agencies who
do not want to allow public access to their data holdings.
In both cases, a low-performance, spoon-fed, carrier pigeon,
GIS-through-the-web technology is exactly what the doctor ordered and that's
why the bright minds at OGC are bent into issuing specs that defy common
sense and which are designed for "GIS through the web" as opposed to high
performance GIS applications. For the legacy GIS vendor crowd, specs that
standardize a barren user interface and low performance approach save them
from competitive threats. For the agency unwilling to share data codifying
an architecture of "webstacles" saves them from being expected to actually
provide data to the public.
[For another essay that talks about "webstacles", see the "Public Access to
Public Data" at (mind the line wraps)
http://exchange.manifold.net/manifold/manuals/5_userman/mfd50Public_Access_t
o_Public_Data.htm ]
I'd like to point out that I do not have a personal ax to grind in this.
Manifold is at once a local application, a very cool map server and also
exists in the form of Enterprise Edition as something that allows
centralized DBMS storage of your geospatial data in a form that can be used
by hundreds of collaborators. If Internet map serving is a cool thing to
do, Manifold will be the best at it. January's Manifold IMS update, for
example, will open up yet another large class of Internet GIS applications
with greater performance and ease of use at small fraction of the cost of
legacy products. No programming required (now *there's* a cost saving), low
total cost of ownership, high speed... pretty neat.
So no, I don't have any personal prejudice against Internet map servers nor
centralized geospatial DBMS's within multi-user environments. I do,
however, feel a duty to challenge the living fossil technological
assumptions built into OGC, especially when they are promoted by companies
trying to defend their living fossil products from competition.
I also think it important to challenge the sociological falsehoods
und
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