[Board] Coordinating with OGC

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

On 03/02/2010 06:16, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
> We have these donated OGC membership, but I know many of you who are
> involved already have one and attend some meetings.  In light of their
> existing meetings, I was wondering if OSGeo could help organise a
> meeting around the same times/place as theirs - with the express purpose
> of discussing how OSGeo might compliment OGC work, standards or address
> opportunities seen at their meetings.  I assume that some gaps in OSGeo
> software or approaches might become evident, or some other opportunities
> to help OSGeo shine might become apparent.

A quick thought from the sidelines. One OGC activity in which European 
OSGeo developers were taking an active part, was a proposed GeoAPI SWG.

It seemed interesting in that it was not a format+protocol standards 
effort, but an interface effort somewhere in between, auto-testable, and 
bringing together software projects (at least within the Java language 
community)

http://geoapi.sourceforge.net/charter.html

I liked the idea that it's driven by implementation, not by the abstract 
model. I think the SWG may have become a casualty of the 
GeoTools/GeoToolkit fork. All the more reason to make it work for other 
language communities.

There's also INSPIRE. I've heard that several Scandinavian countries are 
collaborating on patches to GeoNetwork to create an INSPIRE-compliant 
"member state geoportal". IMO the INSPIRE process is down a bit of a 
rabbit-hole at the moment, but the next couple of years are a critical 
time - obligations on public authorities from the end of this year for 
metadata, catalog and WMS services - and a collective need to do it 
sustainably and on the cheap.

It would be interesting/valuable to have both historic and current info 
about where OSGeo software has been used in OGC testbeds - and help to 
figure out where and why it's not being used.

good luck,


jo
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