Keep it simple, stupid!
Standards set by the OGC usually lack simplicity. They are specified by and for the business world. This is of course perfectly valid: Web services are normally used for B2B transactions. But due to too many companies taking part in the standardisation process, results usually are an agglomeration of ideas, rendering the standards too complex for non-professionals.
Times changed: with the appereance of web mapping tools (and APIs) from Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, geographic information got ubiquitous. Clever people started to mix the free available geodata with other, formerly non-spatial information. Mash-Ups combine pictures, blogs, calendars, and other with such maps. Lots of data got suddenly spatially encoded, making new user interaction techniques formerly restricted to GIS available to web applications. Companies noticed this development and reacted. Mash-Ups (and now we are in presence) are getting professional, take the new geotagging functionality by Flickr as example.
So, big companies + paying non-professional web user on the one hand, OGC on the other hand. It seems to be obvious that OGC has to change. Google is already member of OGC, I doubt that Yahoo and Microsoft will wait much longer. Not too long ago members of the OGC released a white paper about ways to incorporate GeoRSS. RSS is used to aggregate information, GeoRSS is an extension adds simple spatial features. And it is upward compatible to GML. Flickr is using it: you can use a GeoRSS compatible Feedreader to show the last 20 pictures of, let’s say, Münster. In my opinion (there are other opinions as well of course) this could be a great chance for OGC to see simplified (but upward compatible) versions of their standards used by the new community-based online platforms. OGC only has to create these robust, efficient and simple to implement beginner-versions of their standards.
Otherwise we will get contra standards like the Simple Catalog Interface.
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5. October 2006 um 11:22
I am not so sure whether you can compare those two very different worlds. The APIs of Google, Yahoo etc aim at being usable by everyone who knows a little web-programming, and they build on a fixed dataset. The OGC standards, on the other hand, aim at flexibility. They are designed for a broad range of purposes in which spatial data web services can be useful, especially in the business context.
On the other hand, it is nice to have this upward compatibility like between GeoRSS and GML. But I don’t think this is possible for the WMS spec, for example, because it is designed completely different than all the JavaScript APIs used to build mash-ups.