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Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 13:58:40 -0500
From: Patrick McGlamery <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: How's a poor map librarian to cope?
Sender: Patrick McGlamery <[log in to unmask]>



Collegues;

In the past month several significant standards have been proposed and
are open for discussion:

Lance McKee's announcement  of  "Requests for Comment on its pending
OpenGIS Web Map Server Interface Specification and OpenGIS Geography
Markup Language (GML) Specification."

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative's 'Coverage Working Group'
<http://purl.org/dc/groups/coverage.htm> and proposed standards to the
coverage element (good, though perhaps dated, discussion at
<http://www.sdc.ucsb.edu/~mary/coverage.htm>)

In addition, active work on International Standard ISO CD 15046-18,
Geographic information   Part 18: Encoding, is under preparation by the
Technical Committee ISO/TC 211 Geographic information/Geomatics. The
standard can be obtained by your national standardisation body.
<http://www.informatics.sintef.no/UML2XML/std/index.htm>

It is all coming very quickly to the majority of us, and yet these
standards will be critical to virtually all of us who are managing
digital spatial data.

Could someone undertake to enlighten us to these actions, their history,
the impact on the mapping community and, perhaps, the map library
community?  I am particulary interested in how these mark-up languages
work with each other and what, if any, conflicts, there might be.  Some
of our collegues who have been involved might have some text available,
or can point us to an annotated bibliography.

Thanks,

Patrick McGlamery
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