24 October 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seekspublic comment on the candidate “GML-NIL profile” of the OGC GeographyMarkup Language (GML) Encoding standard. GML is a widely used XML grammar for encodinginformation about geographical features. The GML-NIL profile provides a way to allowdata providers to make a best effort to supply data according to an applicationschema, even if they do not have values for all feature properties. This isachieved by marking the application schema as a whole as ‘nillable=true' andusing OGC ‘nil' URIs in links for missing data. This reverses the usual patternwhich has a default value of nillable=false.
The GML-NIL pattern of use has been used informally forseveral years in Earth and environmental science applications, and this candidatestandard merely aims to formalize and document the practice. It is expected tobe useful in many applications where a heterogeneous community wishes to enableparticipation by a wide variety of members with different capabilities and datasources. The submission team is composed of members of the GeoSciML project.
The candidate OGC GML-NIL standard document is availablefor review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/91.
The closing date for comments will be 23 November 2012.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universitiesparticipating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatialstandards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that”geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, andmainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatialinformation and services accessible and useful with any application that needsto be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
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