As others have stated in comments to the original article, the geospatial community has been working to address portions of the challenges described by developing a rich set of geospatial standards based on XML that enable interoperability among data producers. The use of consensus-based international standards (not agency specific standards) promotes competition while at the same time reducing integration and development costs.

Many organizations, such as NGA, Ordnance Survey, US DHS, Dutch Cadastre, OneGeology, Eurocontrol, FAA and FGDC have adopted agreed to content models and then encode these models as XML-based GML (often in the ‘simple’ form too, so complexity is reduced). There are now many geospatial technology products from forward-looking vendors that can ingest GML. In addition, there’s an international standard now for easy XML-based data delivery called KML.

I also find it strange that this article only touched on GIS data – and everyone assumed that the discussion was about a geospatial data type called “geographic features”. But handling the many varieties of content found in the geospatial market isn’t as simple as manipulating a GIS feature. It’s a fact of life that geospatial content and services come in many varieties and formats. A minimal “must interoperate” list includes:

Tile-based mapping services (Google Maps, Microsoft Bing, OpenStreetMap etc.)

Region-based standard mapping services (OGC WMS, WCS etc.)

Features-based services (OGC WFS, Google’s KML network links, GeoRSS feeds etc.)

Features files (ESRI Shapefiles, MIF, DXF etc.)

Raster files (JPEG, TIFF, GeoTIFF etc.)

Metadata sources (Catalogs, OGC Capabilities etc.)

So what to do? Well, organizations like OGC and ISO have been working on standards for these different categories for a while and making good progress.

Bottom Line – the basic assertions of this article are both right, wrong and incomplete. That GIS data is a mess. Yep, GIS data is a bit of a mess, but then again text data is a bit of a mess too. But on the point that “there’s no universal standard or widespread, non-proprietary way to federate that data.” Nope, there are universal and widespread, non-proprietary ways to federate the data – based on XML. And incomplete – because geospatial content and services come in many varieties and formats, not just GIS data.