--- Begin Forwarded Message --- 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 --- End Forwarded Message ---