[Mapbender-users] Report from OGC TC Meeting: Is Mapbender a Catalog?

[Arnulf Christl]

Hi,
several work groups of the 71st OGC TC Meeting were of interest to the 
Mapbender project. One is the new Authentication Interoperability 
Experiment that had its kick off yesterday another is the Catalog Domain 
Working Group - and hopefully SLD will finally get going with HQ print.

The "Auth IE" will look into several authentication methods that can be 
used on existing OGC standards (primarily WMS and WFS). Mapbender 
already supports HTTP Auth (to connect with a server) and the idea is to 
potentially extend this with OpenID/OAuth. Other software in this IE are 
from Cubewerx, PCI, deegree and potentially also GeoPrisma. If they 
don't show up we might even do it for them - they already have an OpenID 
module that we could reuse.

The Catalog Domain Working Group is still stuck on growing and shrinking 
ISO 19115 profiles and trying to stuff 150 technical comments into the 
schema. Seems like it will take another round until we learn that this 
way of doing things is simply not working. :-) But there was some good 
discussion on the need for monitoring, something that we already have up 
and running. And finally 19119 will be taken apart and Topic12 removed 
and put into Commons where it belongs. Sounds like Chinese? To most 
people it probably is.

During the  coffee break small talks it became apparent that most people 
who know Mapbender (and there are surprisingly many) believe that it 
belongs more into the Catalog domain than to the web mapping client side 
of things. Maybe a comparison/differentiation with other web based 
applications would help to give a clearer view on the capabilities and 
focus of Mapbender?

What is your take on this?

Best regards from a first freezing and now also rainy San Francisco,
Arnulf.

-- 
Arnulf Christl

Exploring Space, Time and Mind
http://arnulf.us/