The View From Here

In this issue of OGC User we see OGC Web Services helping with Katrina response, soils data distribution, a statewide data center, and little devices that access a very big and open world of data. Here are the lessons:

• Katrina: Upgrading systems to deploy open geospatial interoperability interfaces is an inexpensive and seemingly unremarkable technical detail, but it enables the critical networking of diverse disaster information resources that provide important complementary views of the real world.
• European Soils Portal: When you want to give users a single point of access to a disparate collection of spatial data, some of which is copyrighted, upgrade the servers with interfaces that implement the OpenGIS® Web Map Server Implementation Specification. List the servers’ hyperlinks in a portal, and then everybody’s data can be easily found and seen, but nobody’s data can be altered or taken for reuse without permission.
• New Mexico: Spatial data centers that have accumulated state-wide data sets and state-wide responsibilities for archiving and serving the data, and for developing applications that use it, weren’t "born" with open solutions. But they can merge onto the open spatial Web superhighway at their own pace, upgrading with open interfaces, creating standard metadata, and gradually extending the benefits of openness to their users and to their development staff.
• Accessing the WMS world through handhelds: Location based services don’t need to be strictly proprietary services. Skylab Mobilesystems shows us that both proprietary and open source software can give handheld devices access to free or commercial data that enables useful applications, thanks to OGC standards.

Stay tuned! We will soon be upgrading OGC User to make it easier for us to publish OGC user success stories and easier for readers to propose, find and automatically receive them. We invite your suggestions.

Lance McKee
Editor