mapufacture blog

There was a very good discussion today during the OWS-5 Agile Geography telecon - with almost all attending interested parties participating and a lot of good points brought up.

The foremost is a clarification of the goals and purpose of the OGC Web Services Testbed. The testbed is important to remember that it’s partially a venue to experiment and brain-storm on future standards. It is not an actual formal development of the standard.

In the OGC, as I understand it, a testbed is used to formulate, and implement, potential standards. Then a summary report and presentation is made to the OGC Technical Committee (TC). The TC then actually decides and votes on the standard.

So the current work that has referred to “KML3″ should be construed as hypothetical development. But, it also seems why it’s all the more important to have many users, developers, thinkers, hackers share their thoughts and example implementations now - while the iron is hot and malleable (to make a bad metaphor).

The Goals

One original goal, that wasn’t clear to me (and therefore reflected in my posts) was the primary desire to just determine and demonstrate the ability of existing OGC services to generate KML 2.1/2. This means showing how to take a WFS service that outputs GML, apply SLD, and get KML with styling. Or do the same with WCS or a WMS (just as KML vectorized data). Then to point out any small problems with KML 2.2 that make this conversion difficult.

This is definitely a useful goal - but I don’t feel that was made clear from the beginning. I also don’t think it will be that difficult - but since Mapufacture already outputs KML natively, I’m not sure - which then I imagine does make the case for having a testbed to show that.

Other goals that have been discussed, but just haven’t been blogged (or documented) include: KML as Context document, KML and GeoRSS interoperability - though I blogged about it previously and have heard general acceptance of the ideas, Sensor streaming, and styling imported geometry.

I’ll cover some of these in follow up blog posts.

Hopefully that clears up a little the OWS Testbed goals. Mapufacture is new to the OGC process, though I don’t think it’s very well understood in general amongst the geo-community from outside the OGC. So as we learn and figure things out, hopefully we can help share this information with others.