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Standards Bodies are part of a Supply Chain

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Stephen Desmond
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.

  1. The ISO Technical Committee 211 provides (fairly) abstract definitions and models of geospatial concepts. These are taken up by
  2. The Open Geospatial Consortium, which provides more concrete definitions of software services and (sometimes) domain transaction schemas. These pass to
  3. Software Vendors, who implement the OGC Specifications as Server and Client Side application products.
  4. Information Providers use the Server Side applications to publish their datasets on the web, where they are viewed and mashed up by
  5. Client Side Customers, who are sometimes called "Surfers", which takes us back to the breakers and the reef.

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