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

[Cameron Shorter]

The OGC has an issue tracker. I suggest an instance be set up for each 
standard being worked upon.

Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS) wrote:
> 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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>>
>>
>
>


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

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