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GIS OGC Thoughts

GML Simple Feature at last !

GML

As I blogged a year ago I have been a supporter of the moves to simplify Geographic Markup Language (GML). There are good technical reasons, in particular making feature streaming practical, that require a simpler vocabulary than the full GML 3 specification.

But we must also realise that there is a major perception issue that GML is too verbose and just plain difficult. This is of course an over simplification of the facts and may have been driven by some vendors comments in the past, but perception has becomes reality.

In this context it is good to see the OGC in the form of Sam Bacharachs’ article in directionsmag evangelising on the potential of the simple features spec of GML.

I would argue that this is just what we need the OGC to be doing, it needs to get out and really explain why the use of open standards is important, and not be seen to be merely as a club for standards enthusiasts. After-all for a standard like simple GML there is always the alternative of KML !

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

One reply on “GML Simple Feature at last !”

Nice to see simple features GML out there. Anyone who’s gone through GML3 knows that there’s alot to navigate. Simple Features GML will allow for quick output content models, which will apply to many (most) providers who simply want to publish their data (many times flat models) in an interoperable fashion.

Having said this, I still don’t get the usefulness of KML. KML combines style and content, which is what we’ve been (and are) trying to seperate to enable application neutral content. Still, that’s not to say that one can ignore a KML document’s style defs and make their own.

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