[Fwd: Re: [OSGeo-Standards] OGC name for a tile cache]

[Carl Reed OGC Account]

Christopher -

I can understand your frustration.

There was some confusion regarding this particular paper. However please 
note that I authorized Arnulf to share r3 with the OSGeo community. This 
authorization was based on the OGC members approving the release if this 
paper for public use and comment.

That said, any engineering report submitted by a member goes through the 
following formal process:

1. Author(s) must post the new document to the OGC Pending Documents 
archive.
2. There is a three week internal review period in which members can review 
and comment on the document. In many ways, this is a quality control step.
3. At this point, the members can approve the release of the engineering 
report as a Discussion Paper or as a Best Practice paper. This approval may 
be by an electronic vote (which takes another week) or at an OGC face to 
face meeting. Approval of pubic release of any engineering report is an OGC 
policy and is meant to again insure a level of quality control and 
discussion.
4. Assuming the document is approved for release, Greg Buehler of OGC staff 
and I then review the document and do a final quality control check. Quite 
often, we need to work with the authors to correct ambiguities in the 
document, This usually takes another one or two weeks.

Now, to help the community at large know when a new document is posted, the 
OGC will be implementing the ability to subscribe to alerts via RSS whenever 
any new document is posted to the public OGC archives. Arnulf made this 
suggestion and it was unanimously approved by the OGC Planning Committee.

Kind regards

Carl Reed
OGC
CTO

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Schmidt" <crschmidt at metacarta.com>
To: <creed at opengeospatial.org>
Cc: <standards at lists.osgeo.org>; "Peter Vretanos" <pvretano at cubewerx.com>; 
"Edric Kieghan" <ekeighan at cubewerx.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: [OSGeo-Standards] OGC name for a tile cache]


> On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 05:26:58AM -0500, creed at opengeospatial.org wrote:
>> One of the OGC documents approved for public release is the Tiled WMS
>> Discussion Paper. A Discussion Paper is not an official position of the
>> OGC. A Discussion Paper is released for information, discussion, and
>> comment. The Tiled WMS paper represents one proposal for how tiling 
>> should
>> be handled when using a WMS. There are obviously other approaches, many 
>> of
>> which have been discussed in the OGC WMS Revision Working Group.
>
> Based on my understanding, the released Discussion Paper is not the most
> recent effort in this direction, as Arnulf helpfully pointed out.
> The lack of information that a followup discussion paper is being worked
> on makes it difficult for groups to put together any serious coment had
> I written comments based on the released discussion paper, they would
> likely have been useless, since the more recent effort ('r3') pursues a
> different direction for solving a similar problem.
>
> The date on the 'r3' draft is 2007-11-13. My calendar shows it to be
> more than a month later than that -- and still, there has been no
> information published that I can find about the "OpenGIS® Web Map Tiling
> Service Discussion Paper" other than through Arnulf posting to this
> mailing list and sharing it with us directly on IRC. :)
>
> The 'r3' draft -- again, provided by Arnulf, not OGC --  is actually
> relatively comprehensive, but there are a number of points that I would
> find it useful to discuss with the authors and the community at large.
> However, I see no indication that there is a place to discuss or offer
> feedback to the OGC -- only the authors emails are in either draft, so
> far as I can tell. Without a feedback mechanism that is shared, community
> feedback on a spec is likely to be limited at best. I seldom spend time
> on email related to standards or open source development that isn't
> shared: users who email me directly for assistance with OpenLayers, for
> example, are redirected to the mailing list, where I will help them.
>
> These type of things limit the feedback that the open source community
> offers to the OGC developments. Perhaps this is acceptable to OGC:
> since the paper is only a discussion paper, and not a specification,
> perhaps community feedback is not being sought at this time. However,
> not involving interested parties early and often is likely to cause pain
> at some point along the line, and I think that it is important for the
> OGC to recognize this, and seek to involve the community -- both open
> source and proprietary -- at every step along the way in order to
> develop the best specification possible.
>
> When will the *current* tiled WMS work be released? That's what I'm
> really interested in, more than anything else, at this point -- that,
> and a mechanism by which comments can be submitted to it. The paper
> itself says "It is distributed for review and comment." -- hopefully
> such comments can be shared in a way that benefits all when possible.
>
> Note that none of this is a direct critique of this Discussion Paper.
> The comments in this email represent my frustration with OGC process as
> I understand it -- and since I'm not an OGC member, the only vantage
> point I have is from far outside the OGC community. Hopefully it will
> just turn out that I'm misinformed, and that this is all a lot of
> unneccesary chatter because I can't use Google. :)
>
> Regards,
> -- 
> Christopher Schmidt
> MetaCarta