[OSGeo-Standards] OGC vote on LAS 1.4 as a community standard

[Arnulf Christl]

Folks,

((I have a distinct feeling of old men fighting over history. Please
don't feel insulted, I am absolutely including myself in this category
and cannot suppress a grin... ))

Coming back to the original question: Earlier concerns regarding a
competing proprietary version of the LIDAR format are not being
addressed (opposed / fought off) by the OGC (which is neither a
political nor lobbying engine). The ballot for recommendation to approve
the new Community standard work item for LAS 1.4 is just that.
Recommendation to approve this standard.


Summarizing this thread:
1. It appears to be a good idea for OGC to brand ASPRS' LAS as a
community standard. It will not influence how the committee works. But
it does remind me a bit of the OSGeo incubation process [1]. OGC is
still defining how this may look like there.
2. Small communities sometimes produce great results and are often under
represented and under acknowledged. OGC tries to address this. Thanks
for this discussion.
3. Individuals sometimes do great work and are always under represented
and under acknowledged.

But the communities those folks work in do recognize them. Therefore in
my role as President Emeritus of OSGeo I want to thank Peter, Martin,
Carl, Bruce and Howard for their decade long support of all geospatial
openness. Keep it up.


I'd be interested in learning how the new "community standard" might
help to support the widespread use of the open LAS format version.


Best regard,
Arnulf

[1] http://www.osgeo.org/incubator

On 31.01.2017 16:23, Howard Butler wrote:
> Collating this thread together into a single response...
> 
>> On Jan 31, 2017, at 2:34 AM, Peter Baumann
>> <p.baumann at jacobs-university.de> wrote:
>>> another (GeoRSS) was created by a small group of volunteers. 
>>> OGC's shepherding of GeoRSS and corresponding implementation and
>>> ownership confusion was a very significant event that shaped my
>>> active participation in community-oriented standards efforts like
>>> ASPRS LAS and GeoJSON. GeoRSS was frustrating experience. The
>>> lesson of GeoRSS was an OGC "community stamp" should not ever be
>>> a quitclaim deed to transfer the community management and
>>> ownership of the specification to OGC, especially if the
>>> community of implementations around that document is still
>>> actively using, engaging, and supporting it.
>> 
>> Huh? OGC shold stand for it, but OGC has no means to do active
>> quality control? Interesting concept.
> 
>> In other words: OGC should give a rubberstamp, but without any
>> opportunity of correcting possible flaws. Aka self-service shop for
>> branding.
> 
> It was OGC and OGC's membership that put forward LAS as a community
> standard, not the ASPRS LAS committee. OGC should not get to "quality
> control" anything. If OGC thinks it is not of high enough quality,
> they can proliferate a new document with new language, a new name,
> and no branding relationship to LAS. OGC should not get to benefit
> from the goodwill the LAS community has grown *and* be able to
> iterate the document to add support for its pets or modify it to
> align it with its other specifications for organizational purity
> reasons.
> 
> OGC community standards are cobranding that allows OGC to both not do
> the work of making a new thing *and* take the reputational benefit of
> the community it seeks to cobrand. OGC shouldn't also get the benefit
> of being able to modify the existing document to serve its needs and
> force all implementations to catch up in the process. Are there any
> examples of OGC community standards where it was the co-opted
> community that asked to be OGC-branded?
> 
> We have built a significant implementation ecosystem for LAS for
> lidar. It's as entrenched as Shapefile is for vector data or GeoTIFF
> is for raster data. Individual OGC members could have joined ASPRS
> and participated on the committee if they needed things done. OGC
> membership doesn't get to show up now, after the fact, and under the
> auspices of stamping it a "community standard", have the right to
> modify the document and disrupt the implementations we have been
> working to nurture. Scott and OGC leadership have been clear there is
> no intention to do that with LAS.
> 
> Howard
> 
> 
> 
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