Ordnance Survey – Great Britain's national mapping agency
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6.2: Standards (6)
Future standards
Standards are continually being developed and enhanced, and GML is no exception. Many leading software suppliers, data providers and GIS users are involved in coordinating the way the GML standard is evolving. There are other OpenGIS® standards currently under development that will also play an important role in the next few years.
OpenLS is an initiative for standards in the location-based services (LBS) arena (see section 6.6). OpenLS is designed to make geospatial data and services more widely accessible through PDAs and mobile phones. According to OGC, the vision of OpenLS is ‘to deliver open interfaces that enable interoperability and make possible delivery of actionable, multi-purpose, distributed, value-added location application services and content to a wide variety of service points, wherever they might be, on any device’.
OGC have set standards for web mapping that are now being developed in the area of web services (see section 6.5). The OWS-1 initiative takes the results of previous web mapping testbeds and develops them further, with the aim of ‘developing interfaces to enhance the growth of geospatial web services’.
Standards in the wider mobile phone market are also going to be important in the way LBS evolves. Recent years have seen the phenomenal, and unexpected, success of the short message service (SMS) for sending text via mobile phone. With the promise of much faster transfer speeds from GPRS and 3G networks, combined with colour screen smartphones with embedded digital cameras, the standard for exchange of multimedia messages (MMS) will be important, especially as this will be the method through which GI will be visualised on these devices.
The Japanese are a particularly useful example for demonstrating the importance of standards. Standards are established very quickly in Japan through cooperation between the standard’s bodies and industry players. This enables new technology industries to be developed very quickly. The success of the i-mode system in Japan demonstrates this. Since starting in 1999, this colour screen, Internet access, mobile phone system has grown so much that by March 2002 i-mode claimed 31.3 million subscribers (25% of the population) and 53 000 compatible web sites. This is a stunning example of the benefits of standards and, as you can see, this will be a crucial issue for GIS in the future.