Category: OGC

Next week I will be attending the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, and if it has anything like the impact the conference had last year on the Geographic Information world, it will not disappoint.

Although last year saw major announcements from the GYM club, it was the presentations from people like Nathan Eagle and the father of mash-ups Paul Rademacher who really demonstrated the paradigm shift that is happening in the use of geographic information.

Neither Nathan or Paul come from the “traditional” GIS industry and although it is not unusual for innovation to come from the edge of an existing domain, it is causing a real cultural clash with the established industry.

The “mash-up” community have a different culture and a different world view to the traditional industry, this was perfectly illustrated this week in the blogosphere with a discussion around how the developing GeoRSS standard is taken forward, with well argued points made by Allan Doyle in his blog, where he expresses concerns as to the potential for OGC to “hijack” the standard.

The OGC, I hope in this case, wish only to move towards greater adoption of GeoRSS, but may have to modify their processes radically in recognition that the dynamic of the industry has changed – a point many other organisations representing the “traditional” GI industry would do well to recognise.

If you are travelling to where 2.0 drop me a line – It would be good to catch up over a beer and meet in real life.

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

As a long time user of their OS MasterMap GML viewer, I was really pleased to see Snowflake release their new GML Viewer which Snowflake claims can display any GML2/3 application schema. The snowflake guys really understand GML, as an XML dialect, a good application should be able to parse the contents of a “new” file and work out what to do with it, in the past too many vendors have made the short cut of writing tools for specific application schemas – which is only viable in the short term.

To complete my gushing… the GML viewer is a true cross platform java2se application which works on Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS X !!

Written and submitted from Starbucks,Holborn, using the t-mobile wifi connection.

As Martin points out in his return to blogging (welcome back !!) one of the most interesting presentations at this OGC TC meeting was the one given by Raj Singh on GeoRSS.

GeoRSS is a rapidly developing standard to encode locations into RSS feeds, so that for example, your blog aggregator software could subscribe to blogs whose entries relate to locations within 50 km’s of where you live, and of course to allow this to happen, also allow authors to tag their content with geographic location.

The real challenge here is to keep this encoding simple, following the rationale of RSS itself, while also allowing for more complex geographic information than simple Lat,Long pairs.

The approach taken so far is too offer two encoding types simple and gml which work with the Atom standard to extend RSS.

The Simple encoding which will meet the needs of most users take the form;

<georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point>

While the more flexible GML encoding embeds GML features, offering more flexibility including different co-ordinate systems, and uses the form

<gml:Point>
   <gml:pos>45.256 -71.92</gml:pos>
</gml:Point>

Both encodings also support tagging line-strings, polygons and envelopes (MBRs).

There is real potential here for a standard to bring geographic information to the mainstream, however we also need to recognise there are other encoding out there and geoRSS will have to make it’s case against gpx, kml etc.

Look out for geoRSS entries from edparsons.com in the near future !

Written and submitted from The Marriott Hotel, Huntsville, using the hotel in-room internet connection.