[OSGeo-info] press question

[Frank Warmerdam]

Adena Schutzberg wrote:
> Hello OSGEO,
> 
> I'm guessing this will get to Tyler, but since he's not yet listed as a
> contact/press contact, I'll start here.

Adena,

Tyler hasn't been tied to the info at osgeo.org yoke yet, but will be
shortly.  :-)

> I've been reading about the Tile Map Service Specification on blogs, wikis,
> etc. and have a few questions.
> 
> Is OSGEO going to do standards in addition to open source code? Does this,
> could it, should it, have anything to do with standards orgs like OGC, W3C,
> etc?
> 
> What is the current state of this "standard?" Where will it go from here?
> 
> Can I get someone to explain it to me (just in case I don't quite get it...)

This is not well understood internally yet.  On the one hand, we don't want
to take on a "standards process" as a part of our mission.  We are generally
pleased to have OGC, ISO, IETF, etc take on that role which is a hard one.
On the other hand, we have lots of folks on different projects interested in
establishing some defacto common approaches, which in some cases might later
be taken to a formal standards organization.

So I think you are likely to see a variety of facto standards *start* within
the open source community, sometimes within OSGeo.

Whether we formalize this in any way is still open to debate.  There are those
that would like to see OSGeo as a home for lightweight standards like GeoRSS
and tile spec standards.

I hope the above is a bit educational on where we are at.  But at this time
OSGeo has no *official* position on whether we will take on any formal
process for developing standards since we haven't reached a consensus (or
even debated the issue deeply) internally.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org