The OGC Blog

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.

For many years now a small number of dedicated organisations in the Australia and New Zealand region have worked tirelessly to improve our data sharing through the use of OGC standards. The OGC is well known throughout the region and the number of implementations of the standards is increasing, but only a handful of organizations have contributed to the standards creation process working directly with the OGC. There is now an opportunity for a larger number of our region’s geospatial players to participate via the OGC Australia and New Zealand Forum.

By Florence Tan with Ben Caradoc-Davies and Simon Cox

For a long time, the use of spatial representations other than a conventional 2D cartographic view has been a rather dark corner of the GIS world. However, some recently adopted OGC standards promise to allow communities that need these, such as facilities and engineering, urban planning and design, hydro-geology, and the solid-earth geosciences, to integrate their world with the view normally presented in the geospatial community. These include

by Florence Tan, Rini Angreani, Peter Taylor, Simon Cox

A team from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia has successfully upgraded OpenGeo GeoServer Software and WaterML2.0 application schema to publish water storage time series information from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).

The OGC North American Forum (NAF) has organized an Open Standards Technology Exposition to be held on September 19^th, from 9:00 am-3:00 pm. The event will be hosted by Oracle Corporation at their offices at 1900 Oracle Way in Reston, VA.

On a sunny morning at the Met Office in Exeter, UK, Interoperability Day 2012 (#interop12 on Twitter) kicked off with 75 participants from around the world. The event was jointly organised by the OGC and the AGI (the UK's geospatial membership body) and took place on the Friday of the OGC Technical Committee/Planning Committee meetings.

The day started with an introduction to the OGC by Steven Ramage, an OGC staff member. This was greatly appreciated by the audience, some of whom were new to open standards and the business benefits of participating in the OGC standards process.

(updated 4 July 2012)

Once each year, the OGC awards its highest honor, the Gardels Award, to an OGC member who has “made exemplary contributions to the OGC's consensus standards process”.  I had the pleasure of delivering the 2012 Gardels Award to Mr. David Wesloh of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for his exemplary service to the Consortium in addressing interoperability issues on behalf of his agency and the broader defense and intelligence community. The impacts of his contribution indeed extend well beyond his community of interest.