(Printed in the August 1995 issue of GIS World)
At the 1995 National Geodata Forum held in Washington, D.C. in May, the Open GIS
Consortium received expressions of support and positive interest from nearly everyone --
GIS vendors, government officials, consultants, and the GIS press.
There are a few in the community, however, who question the importance of information
technology standards as they apply to geoprocessing, or express reservations about
asserting the significance of an interoperability standard within the grand scheme of
things. I mention this because it defines a good starting point for our column. Better
framed, my subject might be "What is so important about an interoperability
consortium that it warrants the attention of policy makers?"
To answer such a question it is necessary to look at new technologies such as OGC's
Open Geodata Interoperability Standard (OGIS) in the framework of economic evolution --
this is in fact where the OGIS concept was conceived. In our early discussions, we started
with the empirical observation that certain technology innovations, even those at first
quite narrowly defined, have had vast impact on product definition and resulting markets
-- the semiconductor, for example, or the spreadsheet. New products can create whole new
modes of operation and behavior which influence the way business is conducted, or the way
government agencies are organized. The net result can be sweeping change that spreads
throughout society, creating new markets, making both people and organizations more
productive and civilized.
If we consider the idea that technology determines use and therefore behavior, we
realize that technology development itself has a dramatic impact on organizational
development, and therefore immediate implications for operational strategy, or
"policy". Technology development occurs so fast today, and organizations are
changed so quickly as a result of new applications of technology, that technology itself
in many instances almost becomes policy. Planners and policy makers are handed a
"given" by the commercial engineering community, and they are obliged to work
with the organizational implications of this "given". An organization's decision
to use fax machines or networked computers, for example, leads logically to new behaviors
associated with the creation and use of information, and ultimately these new behaviors,
which are essentially constructive and adaptive at the level of the individual, make it
necessary to reengineer the organization. The net result is often good, but the transition
is usually painful. In the old days, technology advanced slowly, leaving more time and
opportunity for individuals and institutions to adapt to new products and the change
introduced by these products. In an environment of rapid technological change, we need to
look ahead, to try to understand how new technologies will help and change us, and perhaps
to make decisions that will make the transition easier and more fruitful.
The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. -- a uniquely structured consensus-based standards
organization with members from both the public and private sectors -- presents a model for
looking ahead. By contributing the time of some of their best technologists, members both
preview the potentials of a new technology and participate in its development. The
organization and operational rules defined in OGC's bylaws ensure to as great a degree as
possible that the specification will represent the requirements of all participating
organizations, and the diversity of the membership ensures to as great a degree as
possible that these requirements are those of the larger community.
By providing vendors of software and data with a shared framework that will enable them
to work together to build the geodata and geoprocessing component of tomorrow's
distributed computing environments, both local and global, the OGIS complements the work
of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) to promote sharing in the user community.
The distributed computing environment, taken as a whole, encompasses cyberspace,
multimedia, virtual reality, infobots, the World Wide Web (just a glimmer of things to
come, really), digital TVs that are not TVs but network nodes, intelligent vehicles, and
almost everything that people talk about when they talk about our digital future. To
ensure that geodata and geoprocessing work well in this brave new interconnected world is
a project worth embracing. A technology specification such as the OGIS not only needs to
be looked at within the grand scheme of things, it should be seen as helping to build the
grand scheme itself.
Those who question the importance of such consortium activity do not see this set of
relationships -- they fail to see that the OGIS is not just a technology standard but the
first stroke in a sequence of developments that has the potential to vastly improve the
way people and institutions work. Major institutions need to know what's happening so they
can plan for the technology and perhaps help guide its formation.
David Schell can be reached at the Open GIS Consortium, Wayland, MA. Tel: 508-655-5858.
Fax: 508-655-2237. Internet: dschell@mail.opengis.org.