[OSGeo-Discuss] Live DVD and OGC standards

[Allan Doyle]

On Jul 7, 2013, at 9:15 AM, Peter Baumann <p.baumann at jacobs-university.de>
 wrote:

> Re formats:
> when we write specs referencing formats (rarely done anyway, for good reasons) we do not repeat)the format specs. We rather set referencesto the definition that is "somewhere out there", such as TIFF. A notable exception is NetCDF which was brought into OGC's curation by the NetCDF proponents, and GeoSciML. In both cases, the original maintainers have become OGC members where they continue doing so, just embedded into OGC infrastructure now.
> 
> What we do in the coverage field, though, is describing how coverage constituents map to the particular format elements (eg, coverage bounding box coordinates -> GeoTIFF tags). This is under way for GeoTIFF, NetCDF, JPEG2000 (meaning drafts are existing, and in part in the pipeline for adoption).
> 

The other notable exception is KML, which would be much closer in spirit to Shapefile. I.e., a big vendor wants to have a currently open but company-controlled spec be put under the auspices of OGC to promote its use among enterprise customers. In the case of Shapefile, though, it's the users who periodically want to make it more "standard."

Given that it's served its purpose well for about a million years, maybe it's fine the way it is. 

Or there might be communities that want to standardize their own conventions for how the more optional parts are used within that community in the form of profiles. 

The counter-example is actually GeoTIFF, which was proposed as an OGC format a long, long time ago, by the original authors of the spec. At the time, it was rejected specifically because the TC felt that OGC should not be standardizing file specs, but rather should be standardizing interfaces.

	Allan

> HTH,
> Peter
> 
> 
> On 07/06/2013 04:15 PM, Adrian Custer wrote:
>> Hey,
>> 
>> On 7/6/13 2:03 AM, Ravi Kumar wrote:
>>> Please give info/link regarding
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 1. The software that are bundled in the OSGeo Live DVD do they all have OGC complaince.
>>> 
>>> This is a query we come across and wish to prepare for the same.  LiveDVD bundles many FOSS GIS software which are not actually OSGeo mentored projects.
>>> 2. Is a Shape file OGC compliant (some times also known as ESRI Shape file)
>> 
>> No, the OGC has not standardized the 'Shapefile' format. ESRI has a pretty good document of the spatial part, the database part has many different standardization documents all alike, the spatial referencing files have a pretty good convention, and the mix of other files like the spatial indexes have little consistency and no documentation.
>> 
>> In other words, this is a *perfect* candidate for standardization at the OGC. I now have a pretty good idea how that standardization could be done. However, that work would benefit from ESRI support yet, due to recent events at the OGC, now is not a great time to embark on this project. If it does happen, there will be some decisions to be made and it would be good to get input on those from the various free software projects that have implemented the file format.
>> 
>>>     Is there a list of File Formats and OGC compliance ?
>> 
>> If your question is 'what file formats have been standardized at the OGC?' then I don't know of any list. Probably, you are meaning spatial data formats such as GML (vector) and netCDF (grid). Then there are formats for data observations/measurements. There are also a number of non-spatial data formats like GeoXACML defining access control constraints. So, it depends what kind of data you care about.
>> 
>> The list of standards is on the OGC website:
>>  http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/is
>> and you can go through it in relation to your own needs.
>> 
>> ~adrian
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> Ravi
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> Dr. Peter Baumann
> - Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen
>   www.faculty.jacobs-university.de/pbaumann
>   mail: p.baumann at jacobs-university.de
>   tel: +49-421-200-3178, fax: +49-421-200-493178
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