[Geotools-devel] ISO Modular Standards & Cost Efficiency

[Bryce L N. <bno...@fs...>]

Andrea & GeoTools developers,

I'm including a number of people from the US Technical Advisory Group to
ISO TC/211 in this email, particularly the ones interested in "outreach".
Believe it or not, that's a big thing right now, at least for the US
contingent.  Bearing in mind that no one here has the power to get ISO to
stop charging for standards, and that the 19100 family is now and will
forever be highly modular (i.e. interrelated), we'd be interested in
hearing any constructive suggestions about how the concepts and content of
the standards could be disseminated at an appropriate level in a more cost
effective manner.  Please feel free to respond even if you're not from the
US. :)

geo...@li... wrote on 03/07/2007 06:25:49
AM:

> Warning, personal opinion here. If I'll ever have to work with ISO
> something, and be paid to do so, I'll buy the relevant ISO standard.
>
> Yet, I'm not sure an organisation that makes "for buy" standards
> deserves open source implementations of them.
>
> If we were to start copying with ISO seriously, we would end up
> using so many inter-related standards that each one of us would have
> to pay 1000$, not 30. That's totally unacceptable to me.
> I'm not asking a dime to people downloading the stuff I did develop in
> my own spare time.

Oh boy do I understand that! ($800 and counting) However, there's a couple
of factors which force us in this direction whether we like it or not:

1] GML3 (free/OGC) encodes time using the data model in 19108 (not
free/ISO).
2] GML3 (free) provides only an encoding and does not provide much in the
way of "explanatory text" or legal values (but is still 600 pages long).

Also, observe that C++ is an ISO standard.  Is any open source software
written in C++?  (yes) Are there any open-source implementations of the c++
language?  (yes) Is it common practice to learn about the C++ standard
template library by buying the ISO standard? (no)

As to the problem of users not knowing how to use an ISO-based library
without buying ISO standards: There is a difference in the level of
knowledge required by an implementor and the level required by a user of a
library.  By and large, users never need to see standards or know
algorithms.  They just need a decent grasp of the rules which ultimately
derive from the standard.  What we need is an O'Reilly "ISO GIS in a
Nutshell" book.  I don't believe that ISO (or ANSI or OGC) would publish a
"Nutshell" book, but there are at least two things we may be able to look
into in order to ease the pain of newcomers, and I'd like to hear your
opinions about them:

1] ANSI sometimes sells standards as sets for a discounted rate.  What if
the entire 19100 series was sold for one fixed price?  Or if we made sets
for Basic Geospatial Modeling using Features, Geospatial Services,
Geospatial XML (not just GML), and other "topic areas"?  What groupings
would you like to see?  What would help people get started with the least
pain?

2] It is my understanding that ISO also produces documents which are
reports, not standards.  What if ISO produced one or more reports in
various topic areas?  These reports would be designed as summaries of the
suite of standards targeted towards "users", not "implementors".  These
could serve as an introduction to the 45+ standards in the family, they
could focus on how the standards build on each other (i.e. what tasks
require what pieces from what standards) and have a much more "explanatory"
style than the detail-oriented approach required by an actual standard.

3] Do we (GeoTools) want to start documenting various non-free standards in
the spirit of the various primers I've written?  Implementors still need to
buy the standard (and will always have to do so).  Users won't.

Right now these are just thoughts, as I don't know exactly what we can and
can't do or even what we are willing to do.  Practically speaking, OGC and
ISO TC/211 standards are married now and there's not a divorce in sight.
So--we want to encourage adoption of these standards, you want to be able
to interoperate without having ISO capitalize on your gratis
implementation; how can we help each other out?

Bryce