[tdwg-tapir] OGC standards and TAPIR

[Roger Hyam]

Before we jump in bed with GML (which I have been in favour of in the 
past) it is worth looking at the other side.

This is an interesting article/opinion on GML:

http://www.mapbureau.com/gml/

And somewhere down this page is a blog by a guy talking to Ron Lake 
about getting RDF stuff in GML or visa versa which makes good reading.

http://danbri.org/words/category/general/

If we think about integration of technologies then it seems to me that 
we want to be able to plug into as many other domains as possible. If 
some one wants to pass information around about people or buildings or 
DNA  along side herbarium specimen data then we should not make up a 
schema for it the user should be able to use any of a whole bunch of 
widely acceptable, cross domain ontologies/vocabularies. They should 
pick the one most suitable to them.

If we go with pure GML then we may end up having to invent or port 
things to it that aren't of interest to the geographic community. GML 
may be a bunch of cartographers trying to invent their own semantic web. 
GML applications may be nearly as far away from plugging in to 
"everything else" as we are.

So maybe a one night stand or an open marriage but not total commitment 
unless we can see a path to more generic W3C standards - is what I'm 
thinking at the moment.

All the best,

Roger


Javier de la Torre wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am still sending emails with these guys working with OGC standards  
> and some times I have difficulties to explain why we are not using  
> WFS for sharing our data. I check at the report from Renato and  
> Markus and did not find explicit reasons, but I will try to put mines  
> and please let me know if you find other reasons why do you think WFS  
> is not the way to go... For sure I do not mean WFS as it is right  
> now, but extending WFS to meet our needs.
>
> -OGC is a big consortium and it would be difficult to get our needs  
> inserted in the standards. So if no one is going to worry about how  
> we extend why should we worry about  following them.
>
> -With WFS we would have to adapt our schemas to GML application  
> schemas (that is substitution groups and we have to extend  
> AbstractFeautureType). We would not like to have to change our  
> standards described in XML schemas.
>
> -Standards like SDD can not make use of GML, mainly because WFS is a  
> service for retrieving features of one single thing and not the  
> relations between them.
>
> Do you agree with that or you want to add more reasons?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Javier.
>
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>
>   

-- 

-------------------------------------
 Roger Hyam
 Technical Architect
 Taxonomic Databases Working Group
-------------------------------------
 http://www.tdwg.org
 roger at tdwg.org
 +44 1578 722782
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