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neogeography OGC virtual earth

Welcome back.. Microsoft rejoins the OGC

In another example of the overlap between neo and paleogeography Microsoft announced yesterday on their Virtual Earth Blog that they have rejoined the Open Geospatial Consortium the industry standards body for “professional” GIS. Along with the new support for KML in virtual earth, I would say the geoweb is beginning to develop quite nicely !

Written and submitted from the IRLOGI Conference 2007, Dublin, using the bitbuzz 802.11 network.

3 replies on “Welcome back.. Microsoft rejoins the OGC”

Hate to be ‘that guy’ — but it’s finally nice to see them playing nice. I was a bit concerned they’d make yet another attempt to dramatically re-engineer a newer (or at least slightly different) variant, and corrupt the standards as they did with Java and especially the browser — and well — what haven’t they re-engineered into their own set of tools?

I great piece of news. Completely re-affirms the value that OGC plays within our industry and underpins the vital support necessary by the big hitters as we move to a more open and valuable geoweb future. As soemone who expends budget per annum on OGC membership: I am really happy on this. Standards, as dull as they can be, are everything.

Ed –

Yes, good news. However, one small exception to your statement: the industry standards body for “professional” GIS. While true for much of the work of the OGC, many of our members, and hence the work of the OGC, are also more and more vested in light-weight protocols and interfaces, RESTful services, and what some term “neo-geography”. The OGC provides a collaborative forum for geo-standards at all levels of the IP stack and for all application domains.

I just had to step in and say something . . . 🙂

Carl

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