The OGC Blog

I attended the second day at the 2012 Air Transportation Information Exchange Conference, at NOAA in Silver Spring (See Nadine's related blog here). The first three talks were focused on semantics. Then my colleague Nadine Alameh gave a rich multimedia overview (70 Mb presentation) about OGC and OGC Web Services activities (OWS). I talked about the semantic work being advanced in OWS.

The OGC is participating this week in ATIEC, the 2012 Air Transportation Information Exchange Conference. The conference is focused on achieving global harmonization through collaboration. It runs from Aug 28 to Aug 30, 2012.

Geonovum, Netherlands has the task to provide better access to geo-information in the public sector. To fulfil this task, we at Geonovum develop and manage the required geo-standards. Of course we base our geo-standards on the international ISO and OGC geo-standards. 

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued official corrigenda for the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Core Service Interface Standard and for OGC GML Coverages (GMLCOV) 1.0.1.A corrigendum is issued to correct known deficiencies or schema errors in an existing OGC standard.

The OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard is a widely used XML encoding for geospatial data of all types. OGC "coverages", which can be encoded in GML, associate positions within a bounded space to feature attribute values. Examples of these geospatial coverages include Earth images, referenced and non-referenced rasters, curvilinear grids, and point clouds.

A near-real-time maritime operational spatial data service for oil spill and vessel detection
 
In the last decade, national and international public organizations have set up various geospatial services to monitor and understand safety, security and environmental issues. The availability of observation data and information at the right moment and with the right quality is crucial for managing these issues.
 

Linked Data is about enabling computers to search structured information about “things” over the web. The linking methodology is based on the following Semantic Web principles:

1) Things are uniquely identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

2) Use HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) URIs, to make those things accessible by computer programs.

3) The knowledge of things is expressed using the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) and queried via SPARQL.

4) Use relationships to other things when providing information about the things.

Office International de l'Eau (OIEau) has been setting up open information systems and data exchange standards in water related domains for years. OIEau's main standardization activity is the support it provides to the French water community via the Sandre secretariat. OIEau teams support other initiatives such as Water Information System for Europe (WISE) and the INSPIRE data specification process. As an OGC member, OIEau is also involved in the Hydrology Domain Working Group, which is co-chaired by the OGC and the World Meteorology Organization's Commission on Hydrology.

NOAA's Enterprise GIS Web Services Hosting Environment project is prototyping a centralized hosting platform that NOAA geospatial data providers will use to upload and publish their data via Web services that implement OGC Web service interface standards. The goal is to give all NOAA data providers access to a NOAA-wide common platform enabling standards-based, interoperable data sharing and publishing, without needing to configure and maintain the software at the program office level. To minimize costs and maximize performance and scalability, the hosting platform leverages popular open source GIS software packages GeoServer and PostGIS customized to work within NOAA's enterprise computing environment.

The INSPIRE Thematic Working Groups (TWG) have been collecting and structuring the requirements for the provision of data within their thematic domain. The resulting thematic Data Specifications, based on OGC and ISO/CEN standards, have been designed to support the various usage areas, including environmental reporting on both the national and the European level. Those INSPIRE Themes that encompass the provision of observational or measurement data integrate the OGC Observations & Measurements schema (O&M; ISO 19156); the usage of O&M has been streamlined across INSPIRE themes to assure for easy reuse of existing tools across thematic domains.

The Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility (HMA) manual [1], freely downloadable from the ESA web site [2], provides a high level view on the results of several years of harmonisation and standardisation work in  the critical area of ground segment interoperability of Earth Observation satellite missions.  The coordinated effort of the European space and downstream industries, research centres, agencies and institutions has made a significant contribution to the definition of geospatial standards published within the Open Geospatial Consortium. Earth Observation systems are inherently varied in design, sensor and ground segment capability, to respond to different requirements from users, mission stakeholders and funding bodies.