[OSGeo-Standards] How to extend OWS Context for several specific cases

[Jody Garnett]

Lorenzo Becchi wrote:
> what happens when you export your map with local file-system links in?
A quick answer is a context document with broken links. You should 
probably make the decision on relative vs explicit links ;-) If one of 
your goals is to reuse a context document between systems; you may want 
to look into a "best practice" section on your wiki.
> I'm sure there are guys smarter then me here to answer, and we can act 
> in many ways.
> I know some were planning to create a simple zipped format with 
> geo-metadata (or just metadata) inside to move such a kind of 
> resource.  It would be really cool to have GeoServer or Mapserver 
> creating a WebService environment automatically from such a zip file. 
> And the same for every Desktop GIS.
Fair enough; make it a zip file that includes a context document to 
describe what is going on (in much the same manner as a MANIFEST in a 
java jar file). You will need to decide if this is a common enough use 
to target at the moment?
> With OpenLayers naturally it is impossible to unzip or create a 
> service in Javascript but we can have a "light" or "web" version of 
> the Context.
Of more interest to me is the spirit of the existing OWS Context 
document; they seem to suck up enough of the capabilities information 
from the web service that a client could make the request without 
contacting the service further (this is my guess as to why so much 
information is bundled in there about service title, or list of named 
styles).

Is this crap really needed? The only thing it can be is out of date ... 
we are going to need to contact the service anyways.
The only guess I have is that some applications were using this 
information as a cache?
> Then your Desktop application should be capable to create both types 
> of Context starting from the same map view. One for the server, one 
> for the Web client.
If I understand you:
- OWS Context "lite": is the file used to describe a visual map; shared 
operation picture; or whatever
- OWS Context "heavy": is a zip file that may contains data and is used 
to set up a server?

Difficulty is that you would want to transform your context document to 
point at that new server once it was set up; ie so a client could load 
the "map" and have the information come from the new server ...

I would focus on just the shared map idea of a context document for the 
first cut; having a portable server configuration file is not a bad idea 
- but lets first figure out how to record what information goes into a Map.
> To avoid confusion or "Fred's GML profile for rollerblading trails", 
> all types of extension should pass through an incubation process as 
> OSGeo is doing for its software.
> This will allow new extensions to be tested an publicly available, 
> then possibly implemented by all softwares.
Bleck too much; set up a wiki and track new context ideas in the same 
manner as open street maps handles new feature types. Let collaboration 
and composition sort out the good ideas and leave OSGeo (and a process) 
out of it. When we feel we have something good kick it over the wall to 
OGC (much like with the WMS tile idea).
> am I totally out of Context?
Have fun,
Jody