What is Wrong with Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Standards (COTS)?
One vendor develops many proprietary standards, which are then adopted by other competitors causing the standard to become ad-hoc. While ad-hoc standards facilitate system interfacing, they remain the property of a third party organization and not that of the publics. Another drawback of these standards is that they are controlled by a third-party provider and can only be changed in format or functionality by that provider. In addition, vendors have embedded hidden features and functionality in their standards, which create an noncompetitive marketplace. Licensing of the standards intellectual property is the major concern with proprietary standards. Formats and data schemas are owned by a vendor and may need to be licensed by other suppliers or end-users (i.e. GIF and Unisys LZW Patent). Who Defines GIS Open Standards? There are numerous organizations that have developed a GIS standard. These vary from government departments, such as the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the
