[GeoJSON] [Mass-Market-GEO] Fwd: Paul Ford on GeoJSON

Raj Singh raj at rajsingh.org
Mon Nov 11 11:00:15 PST 2013


In general I agree that, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Changing a specification after years of implementation can do more harm than good, even when the proposed changes are well-meaning. 

Formal standardization within OGC can sometimes be of benefit when there's a concern about intellectual property since part of OGC's role is to  defend its work against patent trolls, mainly by identifying prior art. However, it's highly doubtful someone would claim GeoJSON violates any patent since it is so clearly an expression of the simple features model.

And yes I agree the SRS part has warts, but what SRS encoding doesn't?

I do wish that the web site had better (or easier to find?) examples that were richer than basic geometry encodings. 

Putting my money where my mouth is, I spent the weekend developing GeoJSON output for my OpenPOIs service. Here's an example. Feedback and testing is very welcome. I've only tried it with Geolint so far.

http://openpois.net/pois/a75da8b9-5e85-46f2-9546-35c87ef0dda3.geojson

---
Raj


On Nov 8, at 10:50 AM, Howard Butler <howard at hobu.co> wrote:

> 
> On Nov 8, 2013, at 9:34 AM, Raj Singh <rsingh at opengeospatial.org> wrote:
> 
>> Howard, my message was intentionally vague because I don't know what form "formalized usage" of GeoJSON would take. But I certainly didn't mean the only option would be bringing it into an OGC SWG for potential change. I think we broached that topic earlier this year and it wasn't well received. 
> 
> Ok. 
> 
> I was poorly received because the subject was broached in terms of "GeoJSON is wrong" (true) and "it needs to change".  I think the biggest concern with GeoJSON and OGC would be GeoJSON getting dropped into an opaque SWG to be "fixed" to align with OGC's specifications, and an updated document written and put on OGC's website behind the clickthru, and still be called GeoJSON in the marketplace.
> 
> 
>> What I mainly have in mind (and what I feel most OGC members have in mind) in the short term is some OGC document that says GeoJSON is good to use when you're building out a geostandards-based system. No change to the GeoJSON specification or ownership, copyright, stewardship, etc.
> 
> Being that GeoJSON is pretty much simple features WKT in JSON clothes, I can see that the membership shouldn't have too much trouble with it as is, SRS warts and all.
> 
> Howard
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