So shut down this list and get to work, right?

[Jeff Yutzler]

Paul R.,

I think your comment is way too important to let it slide (and plus it is time to have a separate subject on our messages).  

To me the question is what is the level of interoperability that is useful to the community.  I think what Sandro is getting at is that the power of SpatiaLite is in its spatial indexing and that in his humble opinion the spatial indices are useless without the code that goes with them.  My question to the developer community is whether you agree - would you ever want / need the ability to go outside of the SpatiaLite APIs to access the spatial indices?  If you do think outside access is important, then we must standardize the file format including the structure of the spatial indices.  

If we ultimately decide that a single API will work, there is still a role for this group.  The standard file format just becomes the schema of the metadata tables so that the manifest can provide the logical-to-physical mapping.  More importantly, I believe the API would have to be standardized as well.  We can't have a Facebook-like "We just changed the APIs around for your own good.  By the way you might have to change some of your code."  APIs can evolve, but they at least have to be configuration managed or the Army (at a minimum) will not be willing to rely on them.

-Jeff 

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 7:46 PM, Paul Ramsey <pra...@opengeo.org> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Brad Hards <br...@frogmouth.net> wrote:
> Maybe its time to go up a level.
>
> Geopackage is a solution.
>
> What is the problem we're trying to solve? Is there a CONOPS / Concept of use
> / operational need statement somewhere that can be made public?
>
> I'm assuming that the goal is to help with some kind of user need.

My definition, not of the user need, but the programmer need, would be
"a package format that with the minimum number of dependencies allows
me to transport, store, edit, and quickly retrieve geospatial data".

The "minimun number of dependencies" part is the part where I see
spatialite as a bad fit (in the same way that PostGIS, with it's big
server and various support libraries is a bad fit). But frankly, if
mobile phone folks are getting over the hump there's not a lot of
other *more* constrained environments that are going to falter on the
extra dependencies spatialite drags in.

At which point the whole exercise collapses. You don't need to define
a format, it's an API-level problem, and the API is already defined by
a third party. So shut down this list and get to work, right?

P.

--
Jeff Yutzler
Image Matters LLC
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