Chris,
Thankyou for the email link below to Open Street Map's (OSM) take on OGC Standards and the OSGeo community implementing the standards.
This was a long discussion, so I'll try to summarise for the casual reader at the end.
I think that if we are to build a Geographic Wiki, it would be hugely beneficial to the community if we can work with the OSM project rather than compete against it.
Raj,
I'm interested to know whether an OGC compliant Geographic Wiki is something the OGC wants to push.
I have limited this email to a few people, but feel free to forward onto others if you think they may be interested.
---
Summary of email thread showing OSM take on OSGeo and OGC:
* OSM is a grass roots movement who focused on getting the work of building maps done, rather than being slowed by working out standards first. To their credit, they have done a great job building a community building maps.
* OSM aims to empower uses to build maps for the entire world.
* OSM seem to be having scalability problems. They have minimal budget and potentially unlimited maps.
* OSM use MySQL without spatial extensions at the back end.
* OSM do not use OGC standards. They refer to "dead by standards" when referring to WFS-T and the "well meaning" OSGeo Stack who implement OGC standards. This was discussed quite passionately.
* OSM did ask people to PROVE capabilities of alternatives (PostGIS in this case) before OSM would consider it.
* OSM do have a geographic transaction model which Geoserver is just starting to catch up with (using standards).
* OSM have tools to export their data to other formats (like GML) but not import it. For instance, it seems that they have not imported the TIGER dataset for USA yet despite a strong desire from the community.
I'm sure there is more I've missed.
Chris Holmes wrote:
Cameron Shorter wrote:
Thankyou for your responses, this has given me a great background.
The one battle I can see I'll need to argue is why we should develop a geowiki client when we could just use the existing OpenStreetMap code.
Has anyone discussed Geoserver enhancements with the OpenStreetMap developers?
Yes.
Were they receptive?
Not really. I didn't try so hard, though others have tried a bit harder.
Is OpenStreetMap considering moving to using Geoserver, or supporting the same WFS-T protocols as geoserver?
They basically won't talk until we have all the features they do. Which is somewhat reasonable, so we're working on that, but I'm not incredibly optimistic that they'll just jump over - even if we match their existing feature set and do more (diffs, rollbacks, commit comments are all basically done in our postgis datastore). If you want to read a thread that is pretty typical (I think) of discussions on OSM about PostGIS and WFS-T and the like, see:
http://www.nabble.com/Server-slowness-tf2928059.html starting with Kristian Thy's email.
best regards,
Chris
Jody Garnett wrote:
Good timing Cameron, and congrats on the new position.
The low-level infrastructure for geo-wiki concept has been started in the form of a versioning postgis datastore. The first cut is available in a GeoTools unsupported directory and is waiting for (your) feedback.
- http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Versioning+Postgis
Background reading is here:
- http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Versioning+WFS
The "pipeline" for GeoServer is here:
- http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Roadmap
And less formal research ideas / community contributions here:
- http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/RnD
- http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOSDEV/Home
Part of the fun with the chosen approach is that WFS client software can work without knowing that
the results are versioned.
The other reason your timing is good is that we are starting to make grumbling noises around a getting GeoServer to be a bit more
of a an enterprise application (making use of the technologies that would allow it to play nice with EXO - they have some nice pages on what they use here: http://www.exoplatform.com/company/faces/public/site/home/products).
It has been so long since portlets were cool that the technology may be stable by now?
Jody
Where can I go to get the latest with regards to the geo-wiki concept.
What has been developed or is in the pipeline for geoserver?
Has anyone been working on client software?
I'm trying to convince my new employer http://terrapages.com.au to get involved in a OpenStreetMap type project for Australia.
Second,
Terrapages is looking into EXO portal, http://www.exoplatform.com/company/faces/public/site which could be used as part of a geowiki client solution. (I'm thinking about user authentication and business rules). I don't know much about EXO and am out of date with the Java stack, so any advice or suggestions in this area would be welcomed.
--
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://terrapages.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5011
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254