[OSGeo-Standards] Does OSGeo really "understand" OGC?

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

This is not going to be politically correct, but maybe this will serve 
as a testimony for people considering being involved in standards group. 
I've been *so* frustrated over the past years with the way the OGC CRS 
working group operates. OGC doesn't work like our OSGeo communities do, 
and I'm still not fully understanding what's going on there. There is an 
absurd trend of creating standards/formats for the sake of it 
apparently, and a total lack of pragmatism and ignoring open 
implementations. My experience up to now has been:

- the CRS SWG creating this netCDF-based GGXF (Geodetic Grid eXchange 
Format) as a reaction to PROJ GTG (geodetic TIFF grids: 
https://proj.org/en/stable/specifications/geodetictiffgrids.html). End 
result: no open implementation of GGXF and apparently no open data 
production under GGXF. On the contrary we see geodetic grid producers 
release under GTG.

- the current work item of the CRS SWG is CRS-JSON 
(https://github.com/opengeospatial/CRS-JSON-Encoding). So this thing is 
supposed to build on top of PROJJSON 
(https://proj.org/en/stable/specifications/projjson.html) that has been 
deployed for more than 5 years, but the current trend seems to be they 
are going to diverge from it in a backwards incompatible way, just 
because they can (or because they want to play with some UML -> 
JSONSchema conversion tool).

Maybe the OSGeo-OGC MOU is still valuable to have some advanced warning 
to what's going on on OGC side and trying to influence, but there's 
obviously little consideration from OGC side on OSGeo implementations.

Even

-- 
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.
Butcher of all kinds of standards, open or closed formats. At the end, this is just about bytes.