<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On 23 Jun 2007, at 21:55, Cameron Shorter wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Landon,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">You have made some accusations about poor OGC standards and the financial barrier to joining the OGC.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1. I'm with you on the financial barrier to joining the OGC. In particular, I don't like OS developers being locked out of OGC's testbeds (which is where the OGC tries out proposed standards).</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Consequently, standards are being built outside of the OGC and "tested in the wild" before they are adopted by the OGC. In particular, the GeoRSS standard was developed outside the OGC then adopted. There is currently work on a Tiled WMS spec and a GeoJSON spec which I expect the OGC will adopt soon. These specs are being built by Open Source developers.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">To me, this shows limitations in the OGC's membership criteria which is locking out Open Source developers.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">2. You make accusations that the standards don't work, and that you have something better. I'd like to hear examples of this before I'd be ready to agree with you.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>openstreetmap. We don't care about standards (in this OGC context), we care about making maps.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Amazingly if you talk to Real Map Data Companies our data model and API are very close to what they do, but nothing like...</DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">What standards don't work?</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>WFS(-T)</DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">What standards stifle innovation?</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>WFS(-T)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>If you look at the things that do work (and I'll define work as things that large numbers of people use), they're either the simplest things you could possibly do (viz georss, all you're doing is adding some numbers (lat/lng) to it before the GML nuts got a handle on it) or some people wrote something in a black box and everyone adopted it because it just worked (googles tile spec) or you had no choice to be with the cool kids (KML).</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>WMS vs. googles tiles is, I think, a great example of what the original poster was trying to get at. On the one hand you have a Specification which does everything, for everyone all the time in any way, and on the other you have something which is approximately trivial, does one thing which happens to be what 5 9's of the population want. Tiled WMS is this big band aid. The only real innovation on top of gtiles was MSFTs quadtree and even that was a no-brainer.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Standards, like ideas, are cheap. It's the implementation that's expensive.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></DIV><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>have fun,</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>SteveC | steve@asklater.com | <A href="http://www.asklater.com/steve/">http://www.asklater.com/steve/</A></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>