Slashgeo

All Points Blog underlines the launch of the OGC Interoperability Institute. From the website: " OGCII's objectives are: * Examine current and prior research on geospatial topics to identify research shortfalls and gaps. * Help form research collaboratives to accomplish this research through studies, testbeds, pilot initiatives, and infrastructure development. * Facilitate and provide education and outreach so the research brings societal benefits and improvements in government services. * Secure funding to support research to fill these gaps."

Vector One discuss a Washington Technology article on geospatial standards. From the WT article: "“The typical market was power GIS users doing things on a desktop,” said John Steffenson, manager of the federal market team for ESRI Inc., which develops the ArcGIS platform of geospatial software. “But like a lot of applications, GIS has moved from being on a few desktops toward being an enterprise application. And not just enterprise as in a single organization, but now with the Federal Enterprise Architecture and the Geospatial Line of Business, it’s across the entire federal landscape, which is daunting, to say the least.”" Update: 09/26 17:03 GMT by S :The GEB links to a MIT Technology Review article on Google Earth becoming a de facto standard for publishing geodata.

The OSGeo-Discuss mailing list informs us the important Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (homepage) which develops and promotes Internet standards, has a working group for geographic location and privacy: "As more and more resources become available on the Internet, some applications need to acquire geographic location information about certain resources or entities. These applications include navigation, emergency services, management of equipment in the field, and other location-based services. But while the formatting and transfer of such information is in some sense a straightforward process, the implications of doing it, especially in regards to privacy and security, are anything but. The primary task of this working group will be to assess the the authorization, integrity and privacy requirements that must be met in order to transfer such information, or authorize the release or representation of such information through an agent.". Here's another IETF working group with a geospatial component; Emergency Context Resolution with Internet Technologies (ecrit).

A new OSGeo mailing list is now up: standards@lists.osgeo.org. The new list will host discussions on topics related to the huge world of standards, focusing on and starting from existing and possible relationships between OGC standards and activities on open source geospatial software.

Here's the link to signup: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/standards

Charlie Savage has an interesting and severe critic of geospatial standards, including GML, WMS, SLD, WFS and of course KML and GeoRSS are also discussed. Here's a recent previous entry from the same blog on the same topic. From the first link: "So do you see these standards used on the Web? I sure don't. Instead I see people using RSS and ATOM with GeoRSS, or shoehorning feature information into KML. There is event talk of shoehorning GML into KML. [...] So standards strike out on map rendering and sharing geographic features, but have succeeded in specifying locations and custom map content. And there is an interesting pattern here - the dejure standards have failed, while the defacto standards have succeeded."

In this month newsletter, the Open Geospatial Newsletter provide a president's message about geospatial technology and standards inroads in the urban enterprise, mainly architecture, engineering and construction. From the message: "The AEC industry has been making great strides in transitioning from the 2-dimensional paper world to virtual world of Building Information Models (BIMs), which in addition to supporting 3D and 4D visualization and analysis, enable easier exchange of detailed building information among multiple stakeholders throughout the life cycle of a building. The AEC industry is essentially building their own kind of spatial data infrastructure in parallel with the one the geospatial community began advancing in the 1990’s to enable sharing of geospatial data. The Web amplifies and converges these efforts. In both domains, standards and the Web's infinite malleability are dissolving the barriers that have prevented data from becoming the useful resource it needs to be. And standards and the Web are also dissolving the barriers between AEC centered and geospatial data infrastructures."

Raj Singh discuss on his blog the Open Geospatial Consortium efforts to standardize Google's KML format. From the post: "And one crucial point that I think a lot of people miss is the legal intellectual property aspect. Bringing KML into OGC isn’t just about what features end up in that XML format. It’s just as much about making sure the format is royalty-free to use forever. We all know the Google mantra is “don’t be evil” (and the people I know there completely live up to the mantra), but OGC standardization means you don’t have to take their word for it."

Green Palolo writes "The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has publicly released a document outlining the overall National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG) standards baseline. An article may be found at Government Computer News. The report can be downloaded from Open Geospatial Consortium." From the announcement: "The baseline was developed and coordinated by the National Center for Geospatial Intelligence Standards, or NCGIS, which was formed by the NGA soon after Sept. 11 with other Defense Department agencies, intelligence agencies, standards organizations, civil agencies, private industry and foreign partners. The purpose in establishing the set of standards is to enable data and service interoperability in the context of a service-oriented architecture."

In this month's OGC newsletter, we learn more about the Open Geospatial Consortium presence worldwide. From the newsletter: "The OGC, now with over 330 members, grows increasingly international. More than half of our members are from countries outside of North America. We have members from every world region, including Africa, Asia, the Middle East, South America and South Asia, as well as Europe and Australasia. As representation of previously unrepresented and under-represented world regions grows, a number of benefits accrue to both new members and old members, and new opportunities arise. [...] The purpose of the OGC is not just to run a consensus process for the production of technical specifications, but also to help diverse communities of interest - both regional and thematic - develop methods for working together."

A little less than two weeks ago Directions Magazine published an article named "the strategic power of OGC standards" written by a Leica representant. From the article: " Companies in any industry need to make technologies and products work together when they seek to integrate information systems from different divisions or subsidiaries, or when they purchase new software that must be made to work with diverse systems already in use within the company. A decade ago, such integration typically required expensive, time-consuming software development. The interfaces between system components often had to be created anew for each job and maintained separately for each customer. Today, the Web - and standards - have made this kind of work much easier." Comments on the site for this article are very interesting. See also some related previous stories below, including the one asking whether geospatial standards block innovation.