[OSGeo-Board] Re: [OSGeo-info] press question

[Gary Lang]

All,

I discussed this at length with David last week. 

We are not a standards body. If anything, as Jo said elsewhere, I think
we have said that would be interested in providing reference
implementatons embodied in open source software, and we'd likely be
interested in having our stuff certified by the OGC< but really, we're
here to promote the use of standards in an open source context.

Regards,

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Warmerdam (External) 
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2006 9:09 AM
To: adena at directionsmag.com
Cc: info at osgeo.org; Tyler Mitchell (External); OSGeo-Board
Subject: [OSGeo-Board] Re: [OSGeo-info] press question

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


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