Ron Lake as Candidate for OAISIS Board

Hi,

I am running for a position on the OASIS Board. I have more than 20 years experience in the national and international standards arena. I was a founding member of the OGC (1993) and have been working in ISO TC211 since 2004. I have worked on a wide variety of standards including GML, KML, WFS, WMS, WCS, WRS (OGC) , ISO 19111, 19107, 19108, 19136, 19142, and 19143. I have played an instrumental role in having OASIS standards adopted at the OGC (in particular ebRIM, SAML and XACML) and vice versa.

I believe that we are at an important juncture in the development of open standards. This juncture is defined by our ability to respond on two main issues, namely 1) rationalization with other standards bodies 2) backwards compatibility.

10 or 15 years ago, most IT standardization efforts began as national efforts that were then taken to global bodies for extension or acceptance. Today we see most standards as being developed by trans-national corporations or trans-national standards bodies. 10 or 15 years ago we saw competition between national standards bodies in a given application area. Today we see such completion amongst standards bodies. In areas where there is not outright competition we definitely see significant overlap. As one example, the OGC has a standard for data cataloguing and registration called CSW-ISO, while OASIS has a standard called ebRS. I will not hear debate the merits of these specifications, just to note that there are areas of overlap. These exist between all standards bodies, and I believe that within the IT domain it is time that we develop a framework of co-operation across a large number of these bodies in order to rationalize who does what. This will lead to better standards and higher levels of adoption.

The second issue which I will focus on as a board member is that of standards adoption. Many standards (by OASIS, W3C, OGC and others) share a common pattern as follows. A standard is created in some haste. The standard is adopted by some vendors. The standard is revised (often very substantially) and a “good” version of the standard is developed. Almost no one adopts the new standard. Often the cause of this lack of adoption is poor backwards compatibility with the “poor” but adopted standard. This intolerable state of affairs threatens the very fabric of standards which has enabled the IT industry to grow and thrive in the past 20 years. The cure I believe is to have more realistic objectives on what NEEDS to be standardized (not everything surely) and to take enough time on the initial version to get the right balance between being “good” and getting adopted. Often this means that we work with things that are already in use and less than perfect. Adoption is the name of the game at the end of the day.

If elected to the board I promise to work to put these words into action.

Sincerely,

Ron

Ron Lake

CEO and Chairman

Galdos Systems Inc

604-484-2751

rlake@galdosinc.com

voting message