OGC and the Geo-Web

I'm pretty sure Raj Singh (whose path I somehow managed to never cross at OSG05), gets this already, but one of the things the OGC needs to understand before it can help to geo-enable the Web is that there's more to ubiquity than just dumbing down specifications to the grade level of the mass market. Systems with simple rules allow the evolution of complex and surprising features. Our teeming, expanding, World Wide Web was made possible by its deliberately simple design.

At the end of his post, Singh asks:

And finally a note about the name, Mass Market. I'm not in love with the name either. Don't hire me to name your next product. But what if we had called it the geoweb working group? Would I be getting flamed like Google did over that new geoweb layer in Earth?

As far as I could tell, the reaction against Google's geographic web layer came entirely from pro-OGC quarters, so I doubt that "OGC GeoWeb Working Group" would have sparked any flames.