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GIS neogeography OGC

Mass-market standards

This week finds me in Sunny Zürich one of Googles Global Engineering hubs, learning how  the Google machine works and trying to catch up on a weeks worth of email..

Last week while I sheltered from the storms lashing New York, (so much for spring as the best time to visit !!) with the family, the OGC held a TC/PC meeting in Ottawa and is appears that considerable progress has been made in beginning to adopt the new “mass market” standards KML and GeoRSS.

This is really great news and will help I believe to bring geographic information to a wider community of users and will allow the creation of a  community of spatial data developers, who will be is the position to easily publish their own information.

With this new user community in mind I think it is vital that we communicate clearly what are the most appropriate technologies to use and when, for example I can easily imagine some confusion in the minds of potential users as to the choice of GeoRSS , KML or simple GML as the format of choice to publish their simple geospatial information.

The relative benefits of these formats is clear in my mind (at least i think it is) I’d be interested in your views dear reader ?

Written and submitted from the Hilton Zurich Airport Hotel, using its wifi 802.11 network.

2 replies on “Mass-market standards”

I am less interested in pure geographical XML feeds (although they do have their purposes) for everyday use. My feeling is that geographical information should be incorporated into other standards, such as RSS (producing GeoRSS), and iCalendar standards. After all, that’s what XML namespaces are for.

Once you integrate into these other standards the contexts become seamless… when creating an event/todo note the details would be placed into the iCalendar feed, when posting your business card (hCard) you might link your most common locations to that, etc.

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