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

[Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS)]

Hi Carl,

thanks for this clarification.

I think you missed answering Christopher's (key) question, where can he 
post his review/remarks of the document publicly and discuss it/them? 
Should the OGC forum be used for that?

Best regards,
Bart

Carl Reed OGC Account schreef:
> 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 
>
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-- 
Bart van den Eijnden
OSGIS, Open Source GIS
bartvde at osgis.nl
http://www.osgis.nl