Just returned from the latest Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee meeting hosted by BAE systems in San Diego, where for me a important milestone was reached with the formation of a Mass Market working group, with a remit to work on “joining the dots” between the established GI standards community and the rapidly developing mass stream GI market as represented by the GYM offerings.
Hats off to Raj Singh for putting the creative effort in to developing this so far.
In this respect the attendance of the senior Google Geo staff in the form of John Hanke, Michael Jones and Brian McClendon was very important. Indeed Jones was interested in seeing how OGC could aid the standardisation of KML and clarify its relationship with GML – note these are early days but at least the right people are beginning to talk.
For OGC I think these are really important activities, OGC needs to embrace and recognise the needs of the mass market, as I pointed out in my presentation maybe there is now a new requirement for interoperability, above the levels of W*S services at the mapping API level.
In working with mass market players, OGC as an organisation, will need to recognise that some of it processes and behaviours will also have to change, like it or not the perception of the OGC as bureaucratic and slow moving is a common one, but also one which can change.
OGC has played a very important role is developing the “professional” GI market, its expertise would also have massive value to the mainstream – important progress then !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
3 replies on “OGC and the “Mass Market””
[…] Ed Parsons offers an upbeat description of the Open Geospatial Consortium’s “mass market” / interoperability process. As a member of the geolumpenproletariat, I spent some time over the last month or so attempting to engage with the WFS Simple public development process marshalled by our friend Raj Singh. I backed away from it a couple of weeks ago, and wrote down at the time some of the reasons why. […]
If you are an established OGC’er it is well worth reading all of the post Jo has written to get the other perspective very well presented.
[…] So, on to the purpose of this post. Sean Gillies started an interesting thread in response to Ed Parsons’ report from this week’s OGC meetings. He basically says OGC’s current W*S service stack will not geo-enable the Web. […]