[OSGeo-Discuss] Last chance to reject "Geoservices REST API" standard

[Cameron Shorter]

Next Wednesday, the OSGeo Board will deliver an Open Letter to the OGC 
and OGC voting members, with multiple signatures, demonstrating the 
large number of people concerned about the negative consequences 
associated with making the "Geoservices REST API" an OGC standard.

The "GeoServices REST API" was initially developed by ESRI and 
implemented on the ArcGIS Server platform before going through the OGC 
process. It significantly overlaps with OGC's existing W*S services, but 
isn't based upon these existing standards. Consequently, we have grave 
concerns that the two competing sets of standards, which essentially 
cover the same use cases, will have far reaching, detrimental impacts on 
interoperability, complexity, and costs within the spatial industry, 
including being bad for Geospatial Open Source software.

Many people, including leaders of OSGeo and related communities, have 
already signed this letter. Thankyou. If you agree that "Geoservices 
REST API" will be bad for OSGeo and/or the greater spatial community, 
then please help us deliver this concern to OGC voters before they vote. 
Add your signature to the Open Letter [1] before we deliver it on 
Wednesday 15 May 2013, and forward this message onto other OSGeo 
communities. (I notice that messages from this thread are being 
forwarded to the Spanish OSGeo email list. Thankyou.)

If you are looking for a deep analysis of the issues, I suggest reading 
the open letter which is now draft complete [1].

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geoservices_REST_API

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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