Topic:OGC Naming Authority:

"Who maintains common infrastructure: the OGC NA registry and resolvers?"

The OGC NA is responsible for many shared identifiers used in OGC work. This critically includes identifiers for conformance classes and identifiers for Coordinate Referencing Systems and Coordinate Transforms. The former are now a required part of OGC standards and may soon become a critical part of service interfaces (wherein services identify their functionality by conformance class identifiers not SERVICE/VERSION pairs.) Thus the OGC NA is becoming a fundamental resource for OGC work, that is 'mission critical infrastructure'.

The OGC NA needs work to successfully act as a name registration authority. Also, the OGC operates the http://www.opengis.net/ web service as a resolver system; that resolver system needs to be improved. The OGC NA has done amazing work, has done exceedingly professional work, and has a core that is probably very healthy. It appears that the issues are only at the margins, in the documentation of the process, in the access facades, and in the monitoring of the system. The registry system must be clear, the status of the registry documented, the operation of any regsitry service monitored. Similarly, the resolver system must be clear, the cascade of resolvers documented, and the orperation of the resolvers monitored. Critically, there is functionality the OGC promissed to maintain as part of its application to become an IANA approved NA that no longer works. This extra work is no one's formal responsiblity so it is our shared responsibility.

This has been discusssed in the mailing list thread "The use and resolution of HTTP URI at the OGC" on the TC-Discuss list. See https://lists.opengeospatial.org/mailman/private/tc-discuss/2013-June/thread.html and subsequent months.

Note The OGC NA has a plan for a work session during the Frascati TC in the fall of 2013.

Relations to other topics

Related to Topic ActiveDirection.

Discussion

Ideas Leadership Group Note: A recommendation was suggested to have OGC staff involved in maintenance and evolution of the OGC Naming Authority service. The importance of the NA service was recognized by the leadership group for both its use in OGC as dependence from other organization on the NA. This topic is considered addressed in the ActiveDirection topic.

---

-- FrankSuykens - 31 Oct 2013

A productive meeting on OGC NA has taken place in Frascati. Please look into the meeting folder of the Frascati meeting for a summary of the meeting and supporting documents.

-- FrankSuykens - 31 Oct 2013