On Thursday June 29, I facilitated a Styling / Portrayal Ad
Hoc at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting. This ad hoc meeting was called because
there is broad agreement that GeoPackage would benefit from standardized
feature styling and portrayal capabilities. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that the lack of
common/standardized solutions here is already inhibiting GeoPackage adoption.)
However, there is also agreement in OGC circles that whatever capabilities used by GeoPackage should apply across all of OGC Simple Features. The meeting
was attended by over 40 people (combined in-person and on-line[1]).
Much of the meeting centered around Styled Layer Descriptor
(SLD) and Symbology Encoding (SE), two OGC encoding standards[2]. The consensus
was that while these are annoying (XML!) formats to work with and that they
have a number of issues, they are not that far off for meeting most needs. (The
geospatial community has created a number of specifications over the years but
none of the alternatives have been standardized and many of them have been
abandoned.) The attendees tentatively agreed that attempting to move SLD/SE
forward was the best available option for supporting the desired capabilities in a
timely manner.
The attendees agreed on the following action items:
•
Rechartering the SLD/SE Standards Working Group
(SWG) with the goal of producing updated standards that feature a core and extensions model and/or multiple conformance levels so that there is some separation between essential and non-essential elements
•
Finding someone to create an executable test suite, developer’s guide, and
other materials to lower the bar for developer use
•
Initiating a pilot to experiment with the SLD/SE
changes
My own next step is to take these findings back to OGC’s
Architecture Board and try to turn them into action.
[1] Don't get me started on the pathetic state of hybrid in-person / on-line meetings in 2017.
[2] There was also discussion of portrayal registries, but
that is a topic for another day.
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