Dejure vs. Defacto Standards…Who Will Decide?

At the GITA conference, Mark Doherty of Intergraph raised an interesting point in his presentation. He compared commonly accepted standards as proposed for the OGC, for example, versus "defacto" or perhaps more commonly "used" standards that may be neither "open" (in the current vernacular) nor a true standard. His examples recognized WMS and WFS as an example of common specifications. While the analogy is not quite accurate, his "defacto" standard was the use of Oracle Spatial as a platform more commonly chosen to manage spatial data. You might think of KML as another "defacto" standard for sharing data on the Google platforms.

It raises an interesting point of whether some standards or specifications are too fleeting; here today but fade when the market determines something different. And how does someone with the responsiblity of developing an enterprise architecture decide.