Clearly it's a Good Idea

When people start coming out of the woodwork to take credit. Stats from a recent Directions article on GeoJSON:

Number of times an author of the GeoJSON draft is mentioned by name: 0

Number of posts to the working group mailing list or wiki by anyone from Safe Software, the company prominently linked in the article to GeoJSON: 0

Frankly, the thought of people storing data in the GeoJSON format on their filesystems, or emailing GeoJSON attachments to their customers, scares me. That's what GML is for. GeoJSON is just a way to encode simple geographic data structures on the wire between web clients and web servers.

Comments

Re: Clearly it's a Good Idea

Author: Steve Citron-Pousty

Amen Brotha'

Re: Clearly it's a Good Idea

Author: Michal Migurski

At least they aren't writing about GeoSOAP.

Standards Body?

Author: Andrew Turner

heh
Incredibly, the GeoJSON Request for Comments (RFC) has not even been approved or finalized by any official geospatial standards committee.
negative ghost-rider, the pattern is full

Re: Clearly it's a Good Idea

Author: Morten

I also found it funny that Netscape got the credit for AJAX, when it was Microsoft who introduced the XmlHttpRequest object that made all this possible.

Lost In Translation?

Author: Dale Lutz

I was thinking of opening with a Richard Nixon quote, but realized that may not be the best way to get my point across... After reading Sean's comments, I very carefully reread the Directions article to see if somehow we at Safe Software were painted as claiming credit for GeoJSON (we didn't write or initiate the article, we were just interviewed). Let me be perfectly clear (okay, there's my Nixon quote), Safe is never interested in taking credit for a format, we're interested in supporting formats, sometimes brand new formats, sometimes formats on the bleeding edge. All we've done, and all we were quoted as claiming in the article, is implement support for the current draft of GeoJSON in the beta version of FME so that folks can download and play if they are so inclined. To see what some of the possibilities are, check out GeoJason Birch's blog. (Aside: we don't see folks really using GeoJSON in a file, but rather in web architectures. That's why our reader can read from a URL and output to any FME format, and our writer will most likely be primarily used as part of an FME Server GeoJSON web service -- FME is about alot more than files.) As for participation in the community, perhaps we could have piped up a bit on a few issues, but honestly I've liked what I've seen. Let your X by X, and your Y by Y, for example. (If someone had proposed that the coordinate order was going to be governed by an EPSG code, I am quite sure we'd have expressed an opinion. But we didn't need to.) I did talk with Chris at FOSS4G about a few things, but admittedly that's not much. If we see something we think would make implementation horrible, we'll get more involved, but frankly the whole point of GeoJSON has been to make implementation straight forward and easy, so I doubt that anything's coming that would make our skin crawl. In any case, we certainly aren't interested in taking away or having any part of the glory associated with the creation of GeoJSON, all we want to do is be sure we support it, much as the GeoServer folks do/have done. If our actions are in anyway offensive or otherwise disrespectful to the GeoJSON community, I apologize deeply and welcome advice on how we can support your (in-my-personal-opinion-excellent) efforts without offending anyone. Until then, we'll do our best to stay well inside the woodwork, quietly keeping up as well as we can with any ongoing spec changes...

Re: Clearly it's a Good Idea

Author: Sean

No, Dale you're not directly taking undue credit, but the author of that infomercial is putting the terms GeoJSON and Safe Software so adjacent that the reader can't help but form an association between them. It's a classic advertising method, like in a TV commercial where world peace breaks out while everyone is holding a can of soda pop. Does the soda really create world peace? No, but that's the implication. I don't claim to represent the GeoJSON working group, many of whom are big Safe fans, and I do think it's great to have vendors involved. Like Cadcorp's Martin Daly, who started the group, and gets no mention at all in the article. At any rate, it's too early (IMO) to start advertising GeoJSON support. I think that goes for GeoServer as much as for any proprietary product.