[OSGeo-Standards] OGC XML schemas and FOSS4G software distribution

[Jody Garnett]

I noticed the issue makes the OGC FAQ:

* http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/legalfaq#DTD

5.10 Is a schema or document definition (DTD) covered by the document or
software terms?

Schemas (and DTDs) are frequently part of our specifications and seemingly
fall under the document copyright terms
<http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/document>. However, as long as you do
not use the same formal namespace or public identifier to identify that
modified OGC schema/DTD (which might confuse applications), you may treat
the schema/DTD under the software terms
<http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/software>. This means that you are
permitted to make a derivative or modified OGC schema/DTD, but even under
the software terms <http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/software> you are
obligated to include/retain the OGC copyright notice. We further appreciate
a couple sentences regarding who made the modifications, when, and what
changes were made in the original DTD -- a common software documentation
practice.

We expect to revisit this topic as metadata schemas become an increasingly
important part of OGC specifications and as the metadata schema definition
capabilities of XML and other XML technologies advance.

The above is clear as mud, I can see what they are trying to accomplish -
but even the w3c schemas are fine to distribute. At the very least it would
be nice for OSGeo to approach OGC and show this is an issue effecting
adoption in an open source setting.

It looks like the technical limitation (do not use the same namespace) is
getting in the way of software terms. Perhaps it could be relaxed to "do
not publish under the same namespace" (allowing its use in pycsw for
internal validation).
--
Jody Garnett

On 6 February 2015 at 08:43, Tom Kralidis <tomkralidis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all: great blogpost by Jody at
> http://www.how2map.com/2015/02/a-good-test-for-ogc-and-osgeo.html,
> inspired by IRC discussion around pycsw OSGeo Incubation.
>
> In a nutshell, pycsw inclusion in DebianGIS had issues given the fact
> that we have the OGC Schemas baked in the codebase as part of the
> install.
>
> In the pycsw case we use the schemas in realtime when validating
> requests.  This is a huge benefit because we let (in this case
> lxml->libxml2) do the validation instead of implementing this
> ourselves.
>
> At the same time, getting onto DebianGIS is of value for packaging and
> distribution.
>
> How do other packages deal with this?  Are there options for bundling
> the OGC schemas outside of the codebase?  Is there opportunity to
> clarify the ambiguities?
>
> ..Tom
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