I’ve been inspired to start writing more regularly in this blog for two reasons:
- There’s going to be a lot of interesting mass market, or geoweb-related developments in OGC in 2007.
- I think a few people might actually read this thing every now and then. I hope to keep it worth reading.
So, on to the purpose of this post. Sean Gillies started an interesting thread in response to Ed Parsons’ report from this week’s OGC meetings. He basically says OGC’s current W*S service stack will not geo-enable the Web.
Well I’m here to say OGC agrees. Yes, the current services are targeted squarely at the mainstream geospatial community. That’s a good thing, and there is a huge community of professionals who need that level of detail, functionality, and therefore complexity. But there’s a much larger Web community out there that we are not serving.
The intent of the mass market working group is to go in to this with no preconceptions. Study the consumer, “hacker”, and even the mainstream corporate IT communities and architect a geo strategy for those markets. That strategy may or may not align perfectly with what OGC has developed in the past, and if it doesn’t, that’s OK. There seems to be general consensus that every standard doesn’t have to fit nicely together on the drawing board. Adoption, or as John Herring said, “ubiquity”, should be the primary goal. (I had better note here that this is my personal opinion, not OGC’s, etc.)
So I’ll end by saying the future is wide open. OGC members are generally excited by this new direction–the support for starting the group was overwhelming. The problem is that most of them have traditional geospatial jobs and problems to solve, so the mass market requirements aren’t going to come, without larger participation.
And finally a note about the name, Mass Market. I’m not in love with the name either. Don’t hire me to name your next product. But what if we had called it the geoweb working group? Would I be getting flamed like Google did over that new geoweb layer in Earth? ;)
posted from the OGC Technical Committee meetings in San Diego, CA…