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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: GISList: Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors (Geospatial One-Stop initiative) |
| Date: |
04/16/2003 12:05:01 PM |
| From: |
Sonny Parafina |
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Anthony,
You might be referring to me with regards that politics has no place in OGC.
I recall that I stated that OGC participants cooperate on specification
development and compete on implementations. I neglected to mention that our
sales forces also compete. As OGC members,we are all acutely aware of the
role of politics.
I agree that OGC initiatives have the appearance of academic excercises,
with words like prototype and pilot liberally sprinkled throughout. I also
have a problem with how quickly initiative participants and OGC architects
are quick to propose a new specification as a solution, this practice leads
to distracting participants away from using the existing specifications. It
is my firm belief that OGC has a viable distributed geospatial processing
architecture based on GML, Web Map Server, and Web Feature Server
specifications that exceeds the capabiities of the current web mapping
infrastructure of the leading vendors.
Part of the problem is a dearth of products that are fully conformant to the
OGC specifications. This starting to change and we are beginning to see
sites such as www.wmsviewer.com from Intergraph. Of course we (Ionic
Enterprise) have released RedSpider Web 3.0 which is a Web Map Server, Web
Feature Server, and Web Terrain Server that is 100% based on OGC
specifications. We will also release RedSpider Studio later this year for
folks wanting to build client applications that access OGC WMS and WFS.
There are OGC member vendors stepping up to the plate with more technically
advanced products!
We think that as more folks become aware of the advantages of standardized
interfaces (easier integration, decreasing data maintenance issues, and
better ROI), the impact of FUD (fear, uncertainity, and doubt) tactics will
decrease over time. Just because something is a defacto standard doesn't
mean that does what you want it to do. Also hedging bets also cuts both
ways.
If you are not happy with your current web mapping solution, I encourage
list members to look at OGC conformant products as an alternative to
proprietary solutions. Contact you favorite vendor and ask them what they
know about interoperable web mapping, also contact their competitors. If
you are so inclined, test drive freeware versions of web map servers such as
Minnesota Map Server http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ or others listed at
www.freegis.org. You can also request evaluation copies from vendors.
Regards,
Sonny Parafina
www.ionicenterprise.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Quartararo [mailto:ajq3@spatialnetworks.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 10:22 AM
To: gislist@geocomm.com
Subject: RE: GISList: Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors (Geospatial
One-Stop initiative)
This is quite interesting. Who was it that recently claimed that politics
had no role in OGC ? It would appear, at least superficially, that ESRI was
at the least hedging it's bet. While this is not an unusual tack in this or
any other industry, especially for the giant with cannibalistic business
practices, but it does seem rather poignant in this instance. We can only
muse why ESRI would not throw 100% commitment behind the OGC approach.
The article seems to blame the OMB for "pitting" ESRI against OGC, but why
wouldn't the OMB and it's customers want to have alternatives/competition
for the technology strategy that will guide the Homeland "Security"
department for years to come. There's a lot at stake, not the least of
which is a lot of taxpayer money. I mean, OGC gets $450K to prototype an
architecture? I can see a lot of extra 0's getting added to the end of that
figure once this is scaled up if it ever gets off the ground. I'd be
curious to know if OGC doled out some or all of that $450K to certain
members to do the actual work, and I wonder if ESRI received some of that,
or was it all gratis ? Jeff Burnett's contention that OGC is "basically
[we're] not the vendor" doesn't jive: they get a contract for $450K and
they're not a vendor? I beg to differ.
Basically, OMB pays out almost a Million $ (the combined contracts are worth
$825K, but add to that the cost of OMB staffers doing the RFP and the entire
bloated federal RFP process, and I bet it's over a million), for a prototype
to compare what is essentially the de facto standard within the
Federal/State/Local government institutions (ESRI) with OGC, which certainly
has a large membership, of which ESRI is a major force, and has contributed
to the technical development of the open specifications process, etc.
Occum's razor right ? The most likely answer is the simplest one.
On a slightly different note, the article purports that "much of the data is
difficult to access", referring to the needs of emergency responders and
others when it comes to spatial data. However, I'd argue that this
difficulty in acce
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