Why a standardized set of programming interfaces? Shouldn OGC standards stick to web services only?
We believe that both approaches are complementary. Web services are efficient ways to publish geographic information using existing software. But some users need to build their own solution, for example as a wrapper on top of their own numerical model. Many existing software packages provide sophisticated developer toolkits, but each toolkit has its own learning curve, and one can not easily switch from one toolkit to another or mix components from different toolkits. Using standardized interfaces, a significant part of the API can stay constant across different toolkits, thus reducing both the learning curve (especially since the interfaces are derived from published abstract UML) and the interoperability pain points. The situation is quite similar to JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity)’s one. The fact that a high-level language already exists for database queries (SQL) doesn’t means that low-level programming interfaces are not needed. JDBC interfaces have been created as a developer t
