Open standards for GIS from an utility perspective
What is Wrong with Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Standards (COTS)?
One vendor develops many proprietary standards, which are then adopted by other
competitors causing the standard to become “ad-hoc”. While “ad-hoc” standards
facilitate system interfacing, they remain the property of a third party organization and
not that of the public’s.
Another drawback of these standards is that they are controlled by a third-party provider
and can only be changed in format or functionality by that provider. In addition, vendors
have embedded hidden features and functionality in their standards, which create an
noncompetitive marketplace.
Licensing of the standard’s intellectual property is the major concern with proprietary
standards. Formats and data schemas are owned by a vendor and may need to be licensed
by other suppliers or end-users (i.e. GIF and Unisys LZW Patent).
Who Defines GIS Open Standards?
There are numerous organizations that have developed a GIS standard. These vary from
government departments, such as the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the
Census Bureau, to international groups like the United Nations. With more than 30
groups developing GIS standards, duplicate and competing standards are the norm.
However, two organizations have emerged as influential leaders in defining standards:
the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) and the International Standard Organization (ISO).
The Open GIS Consortium is an alliance of more than 220 members that include
government agencies, educational institutions, Independent Software Vendors (ISV), and
end-users. Several membership levels are available: from associate to technical, to
principal and strategic. The OGC offers a unique interaction between competing vendors
and the user community, providing a robust collaborative environment for standards
development.
While the Open GIS Consortium is an organization dedicated to GIS, the International
Organization for Standards (ISO) is dedicated to all standards. The TC 211 initiative
aims to establish a structured set of standards for information concerning objects or
phenomena that are directly, or indirectly, associated with a location relative to the Earth.
While these two organizations appear competitive, they have established complementary
relations and compatible standards.
OGC Implementation Domain of Services
The OGC has defined its standards domain to include more than simple data interchange.
Many people misunderstand this point and interpret OpenGIS as a data format. In truth,
OpenGIS standards expand interoperability and system interfaces.
There are four key areas of services within OGC’s domain: core, web mapping, location,
and geospatial fusion services. Core services focus on interfaces that are required by all
geospatial applications and business domains, such as coordinate transformation. Web
mapping services enable the dynamic query, access, and combination of different spatial
information through the Internet, such as Web Map Server. New service areas include
location (OpenLS), which defines a consistent communication of location/time and route
and geospatial fusion services and the combination of non-map spatial information
storage like address geocoding.
