This Wednesday, the OSGeo Board will deliver an Open Letter to the OGC and OGC voting members, with multiple signatures, demonstrating the large number of people concerned about the negative consequences associated with making the “Geoservices REST API” an OGC standard.

The “GeoServices REST API” was initially developed by ESRI and implemented on the ArcGIS Server platform before going through the OGC process. It significantly overlaps with OGC’s existing W*S services, but isn’t based upon these existing standards. Consequently, we have grave concerns that the two competing sets of standards, which essentially cover the same use cases, will have far reaching, detrimental impacts on interoperability, complexity, and costs within the spatial industry, including being bad for Geospatial Open Source software.

Many people, including leaders of OSGeo and related communities, have already signed this letter. Thankyou. If you agree that “Geoservices REST API” will be bad for OSGeo and/or the greater spatial community, then please help us deliver this concern to OGC voters before they vote. Add your signature to the Open Letter before we deliver it on Wednesday 15 May 2013, and forward this message onto other OSGeo communities. (I notice that messages from this thread are being forwarded to the Spanish OSGeo email list. Thankyou.)

If you are looking for a deep analysis of the issues, I suggest reading the open letter which is now draft complete: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geoservices_REST_API.

This guest post was written by Cameron Shorter, and also appears on his blog.