[OSGeo-Discuss] Munich Orientation Convention, Mapcodes, and All the Rest

[David William Bitner]

OSGeo does in fact have a Standards Committee (which perhaps if
misdirected, this conversation should be happening on the standards
committee mailing list rather than the general list).

In the GIS world, software, standards, and data are quite inseparable and
as such when we are writing our software, we need to be cognizant of what
standards are out there. As with the choice to fork a software project, the
choice to develop new formats/APIs/standards should be something we only do
if there are not existing standards that can effectively do the job. New
standards are great when they help push the state-of-the-art as to what we
are able to accomplish (ie more space/network efficiency, better
understandability), but are bad when they only serve to fragment a market
and make it more difficult to communicate.


On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 10:39 AM, Ian Turton <ijturton at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>>> Now that I have your attention, I believe you and the rest of the OSGeo
>>> community would be well served by spending some time truly learning about
>>> this issue.  In so doing, I’m sure the open minds among you will come to
>>> the conclusion that USNG/MGRS is the answer to the issue I am addressing.
>>> OSGeo could do the world a heap of good in doing so.
>>>
>>>
> Fascinating as this discussion is  I can't help wondering if you (as a
> group) are confused as to what OSGeo does? - we write software and if you
> publish a standard there is a fair chance we will write some code to
> integrate that code into our software, especially if there is user demand.
>
> So I expect you are preaching to the wrong people - either we care or we
> don't but most of us have no power to change the world.
>
> At the risk of prolonging this discussion I'll add the following.
> Currently I'm not seeing any demand for this from users - I hear a lot of
> talk about military and 1st responders but the last time I talked to a
> military guy he was telling hair raising stories of US Army planes bombing
> UK troops because they both use a grid system but the the US has letters up
> the side of the map and the UK has letters across the bottom (it was
> slightly more complex than that but basically that was the problem), so
> their requirement was for WGS84 coordinates to match their GPS.
>
> Ian
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>



-- 
************************************
David William Bitner
dbSpatial LLC
612-424-9932
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