19 July 2012 - 11:25am
A Frequently Asked Question has been "Do we have to belong to quite so many Standards Bodies?" Apart from pointing out that the number is not that big, I usually blether about the roles and functions of SNZ, TC211, OGC, IT-0004, etc., until I lose the audience.
Last week, whilst I was watching the play of breakers on a coral reef, I suddenly realised that the answer is really quite simple; the bodies form part of a Supply Chain. For a regulatory and lead agency, the question should be "Which parts of this chain can we safely ignore?" What follows is a simplified, but not meaningless, illustration of the standards and service provision domains.
- The ISO Technical Committee 211 provides (fairly) abstract definitions and models of geospatial concepts. These are taken up by
- The Open Geospatial Consortium, which provides more concrete definitions of software services and (sometimes) domain transaction schemas. These pass to
- Software Vendors, who implement the OGC Specifications as Server and Client Side application products.
- Information Providers use the Server Side applications to publish their datasets on the web, where they are viewed and mashed up by
- Client Side Customers, who are sometimes called "Surfers", which takes us back to the breakers and the reef.