mapufacture blog

Last week I attended the OGC Technical Committee meeting in St. Louis, Missouri closing up the OWS-5 testbed. More on that soon.

The OGC has different types of groups: Domain Working Groups (DWG) and Standards Working Group (SWG). Where SWGs are very formal, and working on defining a specific standard, such as WFS, a DWG is a more broadly scoped discussion about an area or application space.

One of the DWGs we participated in was the Mass Market (MM) DWG. Ed Parsons shares his thoughts on the benefits of the MM-DWG. Namely, to track standards and trends that are occurring outside the OGC, especially outside GIS-specific domains.

So for the session, I put together a presentation briefly outlining some of the very recent happenings in standards: REST, AtomPub-geo, OpenSearch-Geo, GeoJSON, and GeoRSS-Multi.

These formats have been very successful in their development and adoption. GeoRSS was one of the first and took awhile, but is now supported by most of the major mapping libraries and many GIS tools. GeoJSON and other formats have seen a much quicker adoption (GeoJSON is still ‘going 1.0′ but already used by Yahoo Pipes and FireEagle).

One of the big reasons these formats are so popular is that geo-developers worked to add geographic capabilities to already ubiquitous standards (e.g. RSS, Atom, JSON, OpenSearch) instead of trying to create a geographic specific format and redesigning the system and bringing people to them (e.g. SLD, WFS, GeoRM).

We’ve been tracking and help to put together a number of these agile geography formats with the rest of geo-community and also keeping a mind to what’s already been developed outside of the Geo world.

The OGC is starting to engage the non-geo community by championing how GML can be the geographic markup within other standards such as GeoPriv, GeoRSS (non-simple) and so on. This is the right approach, though GML is still too heavy for your average non-geo developer to just pick up and easily add into their toolset.

Mapufacture utilizes a number of these formats. We’re huge proponents of supporting and sharing data via standards - especially ones that encourage broad adoption. It allows customers and developers to more easily integrate with your software and data sets. This is especially true since we’re working with non-GIS experts who want to utilize their common tools for building maps; whether they are spreadsheets, wikis, or RSS readers.

The slides are very XML oriented - keeping a mind to my audience.