cfis : Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML

Comment on Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML by Jason Birch

Tue, 01 May 2007 15:26:55 -0600

Nice post. I wouldn’t say that mindshare has switched to KML, just that GML was never even considered for what OGC would refer to as “mass market” use (because of the reasons you provide).

I’ve always been a bit scared of GML because of the modelling stuff and a lack of simple examples, and have got by with the other “good enough” interchange methods out there.

Couple notes on KML:

there is the Schema element that allows you to override the Placemark with your own properties. They seem to be backing away from this in favour of the Metadata tag which, because it requires external schemas, I find annoying.
while is is possible to store style information in a placemark, KML provides facilities to reference a style defined once per document, or even in an entirely seperate document. This is analogous to the way that CSS can be used in HTML.

Jason

Comment on Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML by Charlie

Tue, 01 May 2007 18:06:05 -0600

Glad you liked the post Jason.

In my view the OpenGIS Consortium definitely intended GML to become “the way” of exchanging spatial data. GML has had some success, such as in the federal government market. But I don’t think it has succeeded out on the web.

Thanks for the pointers on KML - using an external stylesheet definitely seems the way to go. And I’ll check out the meta tag.

Trackback from Bryan's Blog: Interoperability is just over the horizon ... always on Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML

Wed, 02 May 2007 06:31:42 -0600

... GML is essentially a toolkit designed to improve interoperability, but it's getting a bit of bad press right now, both in blogs ( e.g.) and mailing lists (e.g this thread) ...

Comment on Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML by len bullard

Thu, 03 May 2007 16:09:14 -0600

Bryan said it when he said: toolkit. Customers don’t like toolkits. Programmers design those for themselves. They like products that do the job at hand.

In the HyTime days when we were designing the MID language for the US Navy, MID I was (in 1994) what XAML and now Silverlight are now. At every successive meeting, ambitions to make the language do everything increased the abstraction until at last, it became ISMID, a sort of toolkit.

Of course it died. All toolkits rely on excessively complext object-frameworks for deriving the objects to derive the objects, and that always fails because it takes too long to do anything useful. I tell designers using application languages such as X3D, never show a customer something where when they see it they ask, “And what could I do with that?” What you want to hear is, “I can use that for THIS!” Then they buy.

When doing the MID, David Cooper at Antech had an idea for a t-shirt to describe the analysis paralysis that happens once a good idea goes back into committee. It read “More Meta Than Thou.” It is a disease of the ego.

Trackback from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff: What Went Wrong with GML on Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML

Fri, 04 May 2007 12:44:42 -0600

Charlie Savage: Even if you know nothing about GIS or GML [, which is the GIS industry’s primary data exchange format,] its a good example of trying so solve a problem by adding one too many levels of abstraction thereby solving nothing. The...

Comment on Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML by Steve Bell

Fri, 11 May 2007 03:23:55 -0600

Hi Charlie. Having just had the job of overseeing implementation of GML 2 in the latest version of SIAS, I can heartily agree with the abstraction point. I have one word to say to you, though: MetaMagik ;-)

Comment on Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML by Charlie

Fri, 11 May 2007 14:45:59 -0600

Hey Steve - did you actually use MetaMagik? If so I’m impressed. I should blog about it, although I’m guessing it will bore most people to tears :(

I just assumed all that stuff got lost in the transition to Cambridge….Anyway, would love to hear more about what you’ve done and your experiences.

Comment on Lost in Abstraction - What Went Wrong with GML by Steve Bell

Tue, 15 May 2007 03:03:13 -0600

MetaMagik actually lived on a while after you left - Shashi took it over (and seemed to actually understand it!) but then she left as well and I didn’t find an excuse quickly enough. I kinda got my head round the XMI thing - interesting in concept, but essentially way too flexible for what it was to be used for. A perfect example of what you’re talking about in the blog. BTW I feel more comfortable saying this after seeing your comment on XMI and kool-aid (although I had to wiki what the kool-aid thing meant :-) Anyway, MetaMagik finally got thrown out after the SIAS4 development came to Cambridge; the decision was made not to persist with SIAS4 as it stood, but to re-release 2.1 with some fixes as 4 and then re-architect on J2EE. That’s the effort that I led last year, and we released in January.