Introduction

This page details the work required to publish OGC standards in a format appropriate for the Web. The attention span of developers and managers alike is becoming shorter. The common expectation of software developers is that technical information is available Online and comes with all required documents, tutorials, demo data, servers and so on.

Starting Point

Current OGC Standards typically come as one monolithic document (PDF) without hypertext links. "Links" to other standards, required documents and examples come as bibliographical references. This is perfectly fine for printed documents but needs to be reworked for Online publications. Basically all the information needed to implement an OGC standard are contained in the standard document (PDF). There is a lot of complementing material already under OGC domains (tutorials, demo data, CITE test platform etc.) but it is not linked to the main reference standard paper (the PDF document).

Objective

The objective is to create more targeted representations of the OGC standards.

Target Groups

Three main target groups have been identified as:

• Managers. They need to easily understand the benefit of using a standard, the associated cost and ROI
• Developers. They need an easy introduction to achieve quick results. Additionally they also need the full fledged document - but this should not be the only way to get into the topic.
• Users. They need a rough understanding of the standard but are swamped if they have to go into the main standard document.

Each group has quite different needs which the current single big document does not address.

Way Forward

The current standards documents basically already contain most of what is need by the identified groups. But as it comes as a single document it is hard to find an entry point. By publishing the standard and all related material in hypertext format optimized for the Web it is easy to link and split up to address the different needs. The following entry points have been identified:

• Quick introduction and overview for decision makers (one pager)
• Examples (from simple to complex,heavily commented)
• Tutorial
• Demo data
• Code snippets, libraries
• Full fledged printable document (we already have this)

The Web is the perfect playing filed to easily and comfortably link all of this together.

Technical Implementation

1. Create RST in GitHub
2. Publish to HTML
3. Import HTML to Drupal
4. Revise once per year, Return to 1.

Starting Point & Contact

The first two standards to test this new approach will be:

• OGC WMS
• Geopackage (already on GitHub).
• http://metaspatial.net/w/index.php/OGC_WMS
  http://metaspatial.net/w/index.php/OGC_WMS_Demo_and_Reference_Server

If you are interested to contribute ideas, please contact Scott Simmons or Arnulf Christl.