IETF GeoJSON

Sean Gillies — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 07:00:00 GMT

Having busted up my technical/administrative blogjam, I'm going to try to catch up on the news from my little corner of the world. The new IETF GeoJSON working group that I've been incubating finally hatched on October 1. The chairs are Martin Thomson and Erik Wilde and I'm playing the role of lead editor. All but one of the original format spec authors are participating in the working group along others from the original email list and a bunch of IETF folks. We're going to ship two documents: a GeoJSON format specification (with clarifications and extension guidance) and a document describing a format for a streamable sequence of GeoJSON texts (as I've sketched out in this blog previously).

The IETF GeoJSON WG will operate out of the existing https://github.com/geojson/draft-geojson repo and use an IETF GeoJSON mailing list https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/geojson for discussion and announcements. See https://github.com/geojson/draft-geojson/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md for all the details about contributing. The WG's draft is https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-geojson/ and replaces the old https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-butler-geojson/ draft that we've been iterating on for a year or so. This is to say that the IETF GeoJSON WG has adopted the draft of the independent GeoJSON working group and that the independent GeoJSON working group has become the IETF GeoJSON WG.

To get to the next revision of draft-ietf-geojson, I'm going through the outstanding issues in the tracker, summarizing them to the discussion list, and trying to reach consensus on whether to add text to the spec, remove text from the spec, or leave it alone. Some of these are more contentious than others, such as if and how GeoJSON should be extended. So far we have consensus that there is extensibility, but no consensus that there is a capital E Extension Framework.

If you've ever felt that the GeoJSON specification wasn't clear enough on something or is out of step with recent technological advances, this is the time to jump in and help improve it.

Sean Gillies (Posts about geosjon)

IETF GeoJSON