I have to admit, I had kind of stopped paying attention to the REST vs. WS-* skirmishes for a while. Then in March I bumped into Tim Bray's blog post, Styles: Beyond WS and REST where he said

• There’s been a recent mini-flurry around REST and alleged subsets such as "Lo-REST" and “Hi-REST". Initiator: Don Box. Responses: Obasanjo, Jonnay, Glazkov, Megginson, and Tomayko. My thanks to all of them for keeping this stuff in the front of my mind. I’m not sure that “Web Services” and “REST” are useful names for the interesting network-application styles. But I’m pretty sure I know what those styles are.

Make sure to read his posting, he's got a lot of good links in it.

So what does this have to do with geospatial and GIS? Well, there have been plenty of discussions at the OGC Architecture WG and other working groups ever since WMS (REST-based) came out just around the time that SOAP was becoming popular. So far, OGC has not seriously gotten pulled into the WS-* realm although things have come close, particularly in more recent testbeds, I think.

The one place where WS-* and Geospatial are converging is in the Grid community. In fact, there's going to be a Grid workshop at the next OGC meeting in Edinburgh (I'm helping Chris Higgins organize it).