There is a very interesting article in Geo:Geoconnexions International by Carl Reed, CTO of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
, about the collaboration between the OGC and the open source community. If your background is geospatial/GIS, then you will know that the OGC is a remarkably successful geospatial standards organization, which designed the standards process that brought the geospatial community standards like the Simple Feature Specification for SQL (SFS), Web Mapping Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Geographic Markup Language (GML), and many others.
Carl points out that the OGC has made a determined effort to work with the open source community.
For example, the OGC and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
As an example of the collaboration between the OGC and the open source community, Carl describes the collaboration that contributed to the development of the Web Map Tiling Service (WMTS), which has been submitted to the OGC standards process. This was the result of a close collaboration between the OGC and the OSGeo including shared email lists and wikis. Carl mentions that the WMTS REST API originated with the OSGeo and points out that one of the important benefits of this collaboration is that there is already an open source reference implementation.
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