Long tail of atom extended formats

I picked up on a post by Andrew Turner on OGC Geospatial Search Summit

“Of course, a format can expand upon this and offer more complex formats that
conform to more complex specs. But by at least providing a common baseline means
that almost any service can easily interconnect with another service.”

I can see why we need to stop at some point! The issue is that in the long tail, these extended formats are quite prevalent and I’d like to see extended communities supporting people who want to extend. The reason I say that is that even in the rich media space I have numerous Xslt’s, function calls and so on to normalize what is essentially the same data. GeoRSS is an example of a specific community that does it well!

My thinking is that if (at the extreme) two companies in the world extended for a very specific topic, we could at least get some normalized view of the data for everyone as a response from an OpenSearch query.