[OSGeo-Standards] Re: OpenLayers WMS Context++

[Cameron Shorter]

Raj,
The merging of OWS Context and KML is a difficult issue to address. I 
see the issues being political more than technical and to date I've been 
holding off on the discussion as I can see that there is a lot of 
thought required (for the technical part) but these technical issues are 
likely to be trumped by political (who is prepared to give their format 
for the other).

Key Drivers:
* Users of KML and OGC formats want to integrate data formats.
* There is a lot of cross over between formats (like styles) but the 
formats use different tags.
* Both formats contain features not available in the other. (Eg Filters 
from OGC, Camera angles from KML)
* We could ask users to support both formats, (which is what I think is 
on the table at the moment), but this puts a heavy cost on implementers, 
causes bloat, and eventually will lead to low takeup. I think this 
option should only be taken as a interum solution.

Medium Solution:
I assume that this testbed is not going to tackle the hard political 
problem of largely deprecating one format over the other, so the 
question will come down to:
Do we insert KML into OWS Context, or do we insert OGC services into KML?
Technically, both will be relatively easy to implement (with a few 
gotchas). The real issue is going to be who backs the resultant spec and 
builds a community behind it.

Raj Singh wrote:
> This is more of a proposal we're investigating than a rumor. It's far 
> from being a decision yet. I'd love to hear what this group thinks of 
> the idea.
> ---
> Raj
>
>
> On Aug 28, 2007, at 8:04 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>
>> KML3 has not been fully speced out yet, but is rumored to be a 
>> merging of OWS Context and KML2.
>
>


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254