What
is OpenGIS to a Cartographer?
An Open GIS Consortium (OGC)
White Paper
Lance McKee
Open GIS Consortium, Inc.
A cartographer of
the old school would be deeply puzzled at a meeting of the Open GIS Consortium
Technical Committee. This unique technical process has simmered in its own
juices long enough to acquire its own arcane vocabulary. Perhaps only every
tenth sentence sounds like it has something to do with cartography. Actually,
this activity has been simmering in the juices of a group of converging
technologies, each with its own arcane vocabulary. It begins with the software
of geoprocessing technologies – GIS, earth imaging, facilities management,
digital cartography, and navigation. Modern database theory gets thrown in. The
heat to cook it comes from the information technology explosion –
object-oriented programming, object modeling, client-server architectures,
distributed object architectures, mobile devices that know and report location,
fiber and wireless connections, and Web computing standards like http, xml, and
Java.
OGC is necessary
because someone forgot to put the geospatial salt in the "enterprise and
consumer computing" stew, and OGC is the kitchen where that oversight is
being rectified.
Of course, the
geospatial wasn’t forgotten – it was just too complex and heterogeneous to
include. All those pioneering geoprocessing software developers had different
ideas about how to model geography in software, so their data and their
software are like apples, oranges, carrots, and breadsticks. Historically,
geoprocessing systems have been isolated from each other and isolated from
mainstream computing. Now geoprocessing software developers and users are
writing an open interface specification, the OpenGIS Specification – a kind of
geoprocessing lingua franca – which specifies common interfaces that formalize
network-delivered instructions between different systems within one type of
geoprocessing (GIS, for example) and also between systems of different types
(GIS and imaging, for example.) Sometimes only very basic information about
geometry, earth reference system, and geographic features can be conveyed. But
that basic information is often very useful, and as the interfaces become well
known and ubiquitous, new products will exploit them as fully as possible. The
special needs of particular industries and disciplines will be addressed by
special interfaces. Mechanisms for conveying metadata are also being
standardized, although a coherent framework of data dictionaries (feature
names, attribute definitions, relationships) and metadata schemas depends, of
course, not on software but on data coordination efforts.
Some of what’s
being added is geospatial but not geographic. That is, information systems we
use in the next ten years in our work lives and daily lives will, unbeknownst
to most of us, be running software components that do things like report our
location to an Internet server that enlists a service running on some other
Internet server to actually tell us in spoken words something about our
vicinity. Things will happen automatically based on the location of a device
relative to some set of abstract geospatial features, but no map will be drawn.
Place and time information will come to people and to their machines and their
present task through automatic queries into a Web sprinkled with spatial data
and spatial processing modules. But I predict that cartography will prevail:
Within a few years, the most widely used computers will be in-car computers,
and the most frequently displayed type of image will be a map, carefully
designed to be easily read.