Reduce historical weight of GeoAPI-pending

[desruisseaux]

GeoAPI 2.0.0 was a by-product of OGC GO-1 (now retired) specification. That specification defined many interfaces for rendering purposes, some of them derived from OGC Styled Layer Descriptor 1.0.0, some of them new and designed by GO-1 itself.

When GeoAPI 3.0 came out, the project scope was narrowed to a small set of core interfaces derived from the most fundamental OGC/ISO standards, namely metadata (ISO 19115) and referencing (ISO 19111). The remaining moved to separated module, called "GeoAPI pending" (never released), for future reconsideration. It included features, filters, styles, geometries and coverages.

Since that time, features and filters have been revised in the light of new OGC/ISO standards, namely ISO 19109:2915 and ISO 19143:2010 respectively and are proposed for inclusion in next GeoAPI release. This revision has been made possible by new versions of OGC/ISO standards, published after GO-1, which introduced UML abstract models that were not available when the initial interfaces were designed. A similar situation applies to geometries and coverages too, but we didn't had the time to start their revision work yet, so those packages stay in GeoAPI pending.

However the style packages are a little bit different story. They were derived from web standards rather than UML. A source of UML could be ISO 19117:2012, but this standard is quite different than current interfaces and (as of 2023) is under a new revision cycle at ISO. Furthermore many OGC working groups are working on new style standards and those works also seem to be heading toward a different model, e.g. more similar to CSS. Consequently, new style interfaces may need to be redone from scratch.

In order to clear the room, we propose to delete the following packages from the GeoAP-pending module in source code repository. The "pending" module is never released, so this removal has no impact on the GeoAPI 3 standard.

• org.opengis.sld
• org.opengis.style
• org.opengis.style.portrayal
• org.opengis.display.canvas
• org.opengis.display.canvas.container
• org.opengis.display.canvas.primitive
• org.opengis.temporal — to be replaced by either java.time or current OGC works.
• org.opengis.metadata.citation.CitationFactory — was experimental and still unused.

[desruisseaux]

Regarding the org.opengis.sld package, experience with the Geotk code base suggests that those interfaces were not used outside the module doing SLD parsing. This observation enforces the idea that this package, which was derived from an encoding specification rather than an abstract model, is indeed not needed for interoperability at the programming language level.