2015 Recap

As I type this, OGC is preparing for its Technical Committee meeting in Sydney, Australia. Unfortunately I cannot be there in person. Nevertheless, I want to take this opportunity to recap all of the work the GeoPackage Standards Working Group (SWG) has done in 2015. We have:

• Released Version 1.0.1 of the standard (OGC Document 12-128r11). This was a corrigendum release that corrected a bunch of errors that were identified, particularly in the features section of the document.
• Revamped geopackage.org to provide more precise information, including better FAQs, sample data, implementations, and guidance
• Completed the migration of almost all SWG activities to GitHub (everything but internal SWG communication and meeting information).
• Completed the Tiles Plugfest (as documented in this Engineering Report) which gave us a good idea of what interoperability problems we had with the tiles portion of the standard.
• Made a number of specification changes towards getting Version 1.0.2 ready for release. The most important changes are:
• Clarifying the tiles portion of the standard
• Organizing all extensions under a single annex
• Demoting the Schema and Metadata sections to an extension
• Creating a new extension to support OGC's new standard for describing Coordinate Reference Systems
• Produced a draft specification for an Elevation Extension and initiated an Interoperability Experiment (GPKG-EE IE) to evaluate it
• Conducted a survey to gauge interest in potential extensions.
• Started the discussion regarding a potential extension for symbology and styling.

It has been a busy year and I doubt we will get this much done next year. We do have a few things on our radar for the first half of 2016:

• Releasing Version 1.0.2
• Completing the GPKG-EE IE and hopefully releasing the Elevation Extension as an adopted extension
• Releasing at least a Discussion Paper regarding a potential extension for symbology and styling

However, the main measure of success next year will be utilization. We believe the standard is in a good state and that it solves the problems it was intended to solve. We ask data providers to consider using GeoPackage as an alternative (if not a complete replacement) to other formats. We ask data consumers to consider using GeoPackages when they are available and to let us know when using them proves beneficial. The SWG is here to help but the rest is up to you.