Software Standards

About
There was recently some discussion on the main OSGeo mailing list about software standards. There was some general discussion about software standards, and also some specific discussion about the role of the OSGeo in the OGC, the primary geospatial standards body. I thought I would create a page on the wiki to hold some OSGeo members thoughts on software standards.

Please feel free to add content to the following sections. What I’m providing below is just a skeleton.

OSGeo Software Standards Mailing List
Some of the members expressed interest in an OSGeo mailing list dedicated to software standards, but nothing materialized. Add your name to the list below if you would be interested in subscribing to such a list.


 * The Sunburned Surveyor
 * Jeroen Ticheler
 * Lorenzo Becchi
 * Michael P. Gerlek (mpg)
 * Tom Kralidis
 * Peter Rushforth
 * Your Name Here...

Should You Have To Pay For A Copy Of A Software Standard?
What about releasing a standard under one of the Creative Commons licenses?

Suggested Standards
''(This section is intended (I think?) to be a list of "standards" in the geo world that are examples of specifications that are/were not "formal" in the sense of coming under the OGC or ISO umbrella. -mpg) ''

Binary Open Feature Format (BOFF)
As part of my work on OpenJUMP I was interested in creating a file format that could serve as an alternative to ESRI Shapefiles. ESRI publishes the Shapefile specification, but Shapefiles have some limitations that I would like to overcome. For example, the mix big-endian and little-endian data, they use DBF files to store attribute information, they have very little built-in support for metadata, and they can’t be extended to support information like topology. Still, certain aspects of Shapefiles appealed to me. The file format is binary, which means its compact and quicker to import/export. It is also conveys relatively simple information, which has allowed it to become the de facto means of transporting geospatial information. You can learn more about my intital sketches of BOFF here.

Tile Caching
The goal of a WMS Tile Caching proposal, perhaps WMS-C for short, is to find a way to optimize the delivery of map imagery across the Internet. The proposal needs to offer ideally some means by which map clients can fetch tiles from existing servers, in such a way that the images can be cached on the server, or at an intermediate location, or even be completely pre-generated, if desired.

Further description here.

(This needs to be clarified -- there are two things going on here, I think: WMS-C and WMS-T. One is about using WMS to request tiles, the other is about a server-in-the-middle that caches tiles. -mpg)

GeoRSS
" As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds."

web site here.

GeoTIFF
see

Others
Should we have a section for:
 * Shapefile?
 * WKB/WKT? (are these two formally or informally documented anywhere?)
 * GeoJSON?

Links

 * The OGC
 * IEEE
 * Software Standards @ Wikipedia
 * American National Standards Institute
 * ISO @ Wikipedia
 * ISO Home Page
 * National CAD Standards
 * A Take On Software Standards
 * "Innovation needs a new way of making standards"