[OSGeo-Discuss] Would you be concerned if the "GeoServices REST API" became an OGC standard?

[Miles Fidelman]

TC Haddad wrote:
>
> -----
>
> To elaborate on the "unequal footing" phrase above:
>
> One additional aspect of the government side of this equation is that 
> for several years there has been a trend (similar to Microsoft 
> products) in getting the ESRI architecture adopted as a GIS software 
> standard within government IT enterprise contexts. This then requires 
> agencies to transition to use of the ESRI platform exclusively for 
> geospatial work.
>
> Projecting into the future, if there were 2 competing OGC service 
> types and ESRI were to drop support for the older W*S family of OGC 
> services (or merely push support for them out of the core packages and 
> into an expensive interoperability add-on), this would place many 
> agencies in a situation of only being able to serve the newer 
> standards, effectively killing the older standards within those 
> contexts...

Of course, isn't it funny, that it's getting harder and harder to find 
ESRI stuff anywhere, government or not.  Lot's of enterprise Google 
Earth, and Google Maps Engine though.

Of note: I recently moved from the DoD world to the transit world. I 
expected to find a lot of fleet management software built on top of ESRI 
tracking server.  Nope, everything uses Google Maps.  Even the aircraft 
tracking stuff that used to run on ESRI seems all to be Google based 
these days.

Miles Fidelman



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra