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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | [gislist] RE: GISList: Cartography and Data Viewer |
| Date: |
08/27/2003 04:30:01 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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>
> Dimitri, in the thread below you describe OGC demonstrations as
> heavily-funded exercises. I think you are referring to some of
> the demonstrations developed by OGC Members as part of the OGC
I meant the money spent by public organizations that are involved (if
private companies want to spend money on foolishness, that's up to them).
NASA, for example, a notoriously recalcitrant agency when it comes to
providing open access to the public data it holds, spends a lot of money on
OGC-related activities when just a fraction of that budget could go a long
way to making NASA's enormous holdings of remote sensing data available to
GIS users. It's a good example of how a large federal bureaucracy spends
money to give the appearance of being open when in fact it prevents open
access to its data holdings.
It would be interesting to file a FOIA request to find out exactly how much
money the various public agencies involved in OGC are spending on
OGC-related activities, and to calculate just how many hundreds of
thousands, or millions of GIS users could be served if that same money was
spent on, say, providing FTP access to data that is currently denied to the
public by those agencies. I mean, no one would seriously propose that NASA
be held to any sort of accounting of what it does as being reasonably
efficient, but it would be an interesting exercise just to benchmark how OGC
activities compare to immediately available and effective alternatives.
> Interoperability Program. Everyone can have opinions, but I
> think that it's important to point out just a few facts. First of
> all, recent demonstrations developed by OGC Members are designed
> to drive out real-world interoperability issues so they may be
The only real-world interoperability issue is that your vendor participants
are highly threatened by the idea of GIS becoming something very low cost
and affordable to all, and the last place they can find to support the idea
that GIS should be the software equivalent of $500 hammers and $2000 toilet
seats are their agency clients, like NASA and NIMA.
Seriously, if the average price of a high-end, fully-featured, professional
GIS drops to under $250 your GIS vendor participants will all be out of
business. The last thing they want is low-cost, high performance Windows
GIS that anyone can afford, just like the last thing your recalcitrant
agency participants (like NASA) want is to be forced to open their data
holdings to the public for free. They therefore are working to create
standard that legitimizes their obsolete techology and to cloak their need
for institutionalizing obsolescence as "interoperability."
If people really want to be open they can do so today at costs far less than
what OGC proposes. The solution is really simple: agencies make their data
holdings available just as they are using low cost solutions like FTP and
HTML web sites, and GIS users can thrive using fast, high-performance, high
quality GIS products for under $250 a seat.
A good role-model for that is how USGS put vast amounts of GIS data online
for free download in the late 1990's and the result was the creation of a
generation of high performance, low cost, ultracool, inexpensive GIS systems
that interoperate perfectly.
> captured in the form of Specifications and putting one together
> certainly does help accomplish that. Next, it's not accurate to
> state that such demonstrations are all "heavily-funded" since
"heavily funded" is a relative term. For what NASA spends just on its own
participation for a single demonstration (counting all the costs involved)
one could provide open access to a vast amount of NASA remote sensing data
currently denied to the public, say, high resolution satellite images
covering the entire Earth. For a fraction of what they spend you could
provide VMAP1 for free, the entire Earth in detail equivalent to 1:250000
USGS DLGs, revolutionizing the use of GIS internationally.
Imagine, wouldn't it be great if all those GIS users in the UK didn't have
to get raped by the Ordnance Survey? How about if French users or Indian
users or African users could get hires, detailed GIS data sets for their
areas of interest for free? Now *that's* a real revolution in openness that
could happen today if the participants in OGC stopped funding OGC nonsense
and spent less than half of what they spend on OGC into bona fide "openness"
activities.
If OGC were serious about "openness" you would not accept membership from
companies or agencies that fail to be open. If OGC were serious about
"openness" you would benchmark what you propose by running an FTP site that
provides open access to, say, VMAP1, for the whole Earth. But, you're not
going to do that because it whould show how relatively inefficient and
closed the OGC proposals are in comparison.
&g
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