[OSGeo-Standards] How do open spatial standards not meet your requirements?

[Rob Atkinson]

Friendly reminder here - "standards" are just "agreements" - sometimes
adopted at a societal level via laws - but in the tech world
"specifications" are typically the result of collaboration.

There are (IMHO) some sizeable gaps where community collaboration has not
been prioritized, and (IMHO) these lead to a proliferation of standards
re-inventing solutions to the same relatively simple tasks (such as API
standardisation) - because its not easy for communities to tackle much
harder problems (such as how to agree on data interoperability in a
scalable way).

This naturally leads to negative perceptions of the concept of standards if
the available standards are both confusiing and incomplete against a real
world problem - but really a good "root cause analysis" is required here.

Ultimately we need to find a way to bring all the effort end users have to
face to work out how data can interoperate (integration is cited as 85% of
GIS work consistently over the last 4 decades!) into some effort to bridge
the specification gap in a way in which more effort leads to more easily
discovered and used data, instead of more random solutions adding
complexity to the world as more work is done.

So I will observe (from a personal perspective) that spatial standards do
not meet the requirements of data users in a general way, they are
addressed at technology developers, through the lens of large purchasers
(or sponsors) of the technology - precisely because those are the folks who
have engaged in the process so far.

The challenge folks is not to complain - but to work out who could be
addressing the shortcomings you find and ask yourself "is it me"?

PS OsGeo is a potentially powerful forum for a concentration of effort -
and the wide range of interests should allow you to look holistically at
the problem and work out where you can put oil in the gears, and avoid
putting (more) sand in them :-)


*Rob AtkinsonSenior Research Engineer | Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)*
Mobile: 61-419-202-973
ratkinson at ogc.org <JFath at ogc.org> | ogc.org


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On Thu, Sep 9, 2021 at 8:54 AM Bruce Bannerman <
bruce.bannerman.osgeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> In an effort to balance the discussion, I think that we should look at how
> open spatial standards do not meet your requirements.
>
> I invite you to share your experiences with this list.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Bruce
>
> _______________________________________________
> Standards mailing list
> Standards at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/standards
>

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