Dear OGC Technical Committee Members:
Presentations and workshops at recent conferences such as Geospatial World Forum 2013 clearly document that the increasing impact of geospatial information and technologies in enabling a global array of powerful new services and applications in both public and private sector activities. The pace of these very exciting capabilities is a direct result of geodata being exposed, discovered and acted upon in a trusted and increasingly interoperable environment.
Standards enable geospatial advancements at scale. As you know, developing and maintaining standards is the foundation mission of the OGC and our dedicated members who have contributed the time, talent and energy to promote standards that enable open, interoperable systems. As additional governments, corporations and users recognize the power of location we can expect that the pace of activity will increase. This path will allow the marketplace to leverage great ideas and to add market discriminators to provide important new, differentiating capabilities.
The key to advancing the work of the OGC in this environment is driving continuous innovation into the structure that defines our ever expanding geospatial capability. The management of the standards foundation is important if we are to harness the chaos of invention. Having strong participation in the OGC Technical and Planning Committees allows standards development that best benefits from the give and take that leverages the deep knowledge of the consortium.
Given the considerable and diverse discussion regarding the GeoServices REST candidate standard Technical Committee vote, I thought I’d take this opportunity to acknowledge the work undertaken by the Standards Working Group (SWG). It is now almost 2 years since the Technical and Planning Committee approved the SWG Charter and I would like to commend all the members for their professionalism and dedication in developing this candidate standard under the OGC’s policies and procedures.
I also wish to acknowledge those OGC members who are registering their votes and comments during the Technical Committee adoption vote. I am pleased to see so many members engaging in constructive dialogue as part of the voting process and providing their comments and ideas for consideration by the SWG. We’ve also had the benefit of public and partner organization comment. This is a sign of a strong consensus standards process. The OGC policies and procedures have been successfully proven over the past two decades and no doubt will continue to be improved by our diverse membership to meet the new interoperability challenges ahead.
The voting process on this candidate standard continues through June 22, 2013. I urge all OGC voting members to register their votes as they see fit, review SWG responses and announcements regarding feedback they have received, and work collaboratively to advance a way forward for this work.
OGC has and will be presented with many opportunities to consider a variety of widely-used interfaces and encodings developed in the market. In many cases these will overlap or diverge from OGC’s standards baseline, but given that they are broadly used in the marketplace, these interfaces and encodings are relevant to OGC’s mission. It is far better for this kind of dialog to occur within the OGC and its expertise base than with any other process. This position was confirmed by the OGC Planning Committee, OGC Architecture Board and the OGC Board of Directors at a joint meeting held as part of the Boulder TC/PC in 2011
As these interfaces and encodings come to OGC as submitted technologies, they become subject to OGC’s ongoing processes for consideration and potential adoption. Adoption serves to: 1) assure users and technology providers that no single entity can control a standard, and 2) enable OGC membership to maintain and evolve the standard as needed to meet present and future community interoperability needs.
I see the OGC as a welcoming “big tent” of knowledge and expertise in all things location and geospatial, and as a forum for dialog and consensus advancement of a wide range of interoperability opportunities and ideas. OGC standards arise from internal efforts and are increasingly based on externally submitted technologies. In both of these cases, our membership has made these advancements successful for the global community.
I deeply appreciate the support and investment of our Members in this dynamic process and encourage everyone to participate to address the needs of an increasingly changing market.
Sincerely,
Mark