[OSGeo-Standards] TMS and WMTS

[Jody Garnett]

> Testbed funding is pretty irrelevant in terms of helping us solve the
> communication issues with the OGC. The main OGC sponsors are proprietary
> software vendors. Tell me how Open Source implementations are
> significantly more valuable to them. :-) On top of this test bed work is
> rather boring, badly funded and has low recognition. But maybe I just
> miss a point here. Who wants to get testbed funding? Please ask me,
> maybe we can work something out, there are several interested EU projects.

LISAsoft can and does want testbed involvement and funding. We took part in the WMTS test bed (looking at both GeoWebCache and TileCache and ended up going with TileServer due to developer experience).

The patch for TileServer to support WMTS was submitted - and nothing happened with it. I feel if the patch was made available/visible we would of gotten a bit more involvement/feedback in this process from the open source community.

Jim Groffen was the developer; I don't think the standards at lists.osgeo.org email list was active at the time; if not it would of been an excellent venue for the difficulties he had with some of the WMTS capabilities (liked fixed scales?)

> I wonder whether OSGeo could also improve on something. All suggestions
> up to now point to the OGC needing to this or that. Let me ask back:
> What could OSGeo do to improve? It is not like the OSGeo tiling
> standards dominate the world, do they? If we really want to contribute
> to the standards world in a meaningful way we should take this serious
> and not just complain.

I think this list is a starting point, and something OSGeo has done, perhaps a bit of promotion is in order.

> If you ask: Who is the OGC? Then the answer is the same as for OSGeo:
> "Their respective members!" Now, who are the members of OGC? Believe me
> when I say that some more FOSS folks there would make me very happy. We
> have a MoU that gave us 6 OGC member slots for OSGeo folks and NONE of
> them are currently in use. That sucks.

Yeah; I enjoy standards and tried to acquire one of those 6 slots and was unable to. Now that I work for LISAsoft I finally have access to the OGC process again.

Jody