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

[Luí­s Moreira de Sousa]

Hi Even,

you are not alone in your frustration with the CRS DWG. The GeoSemantics DWG for years tried to engage them in an effort to create a CRS web ontology. They never showed any interest and eventually work started as an informal collaboration between the GeoSemantics DWG and the W3C SDWWG. All going well, a CRS web ontology should be formalised next year, then leading to a CRS catalogue expressed in RDF. We shall see how the CRS DWG eventually reacts.

That said, my involvement with other DWGs and SWGs has been quite positive: DGGS, GeoSemantics, Agriculture, O&M. So let us not trough the baby away with the bath water. In my view the OSGeo should remain engaged were possible and have say on the OGC's work from the inside.

I was also upset when STAC was accepted as a standard, pretty much against what OSGeo stands for. I believe in that situation, and those you mention, perhaps OSGeo could have been a bit more vocal, making it clear to the community that not everything coming from the OGC aligns with its principles.

In essence sorting this relationship out would require OSGeo to have full voting rights, pushing back when the odd DWG takes a side step. Though not impossible, this would require some serious sponsorship. But for the time being I see it best to keep engaged than pulling out.

Hope this makes sense. Regards. 

--
Luís Moreira de Sousa
Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@luis_de_sousa
URL: https://ldesousa.codeberg.page

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On Tuesday, 17 December 2024 at 18:27, Even Rouault via Standards <standards at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> 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.
> 
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