The OGC Blog

Recently, the OGC convened its 82nd Technical Committee and Planning Committee meetings in Seoul, South Korea.  These meetings were hosted by an OGC member, the Ministry of Land Transport and Maritime Affairs, and were held in conjunction with the annual Smart Geospatial Expo at the magnificent COEX center.  This merger of events afforded OGC members from over 71 organizations worldwide opportunities to participate in OGC committee and working group meetings, as well as to interact with hundreds of attendees of the Smart Geospatial Expo. This was also an opportunity for OGC members to visit the Expo to see firsthand the array of geospatial information products, services and implementations being advanced by the Korean private and public sectors. 

Last week, on November 1 I was honored to be a panelist at  Panel session no.4  in the Mini-series on "Ontology and Semantic Technology for the Earth Science Community". This panel was organized by ONTOLOG, one of the most well-known international ontology forums. There were about 45 virtual participants.

I attended GISSA Ukubuzana 2012 in Johannesburg, South Africa, October 2-4. 600+ Attendees from across South Africa, and a few from neighboring countries, attended all three days of the conference.

Under the patronage of Dr. Mohammed Ahmed Al-Amer, President of the Central Informatics and Telecommunications Organization (CITO), CITO on behalf of the National GIS Steering Committee have conducted a Value Workshop in Collaboration with the Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC), which was held at the Crown Plaza Hotel, Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain on September 18, 2012.

The Brazilian Army Geographic Service (DSG) has been dealing with geospatial interoperability issues for years. Brazil is the world's fifth largest country in area, with more than 8 million km². Its large size presents numerous challenges related to mapping and map maintenance. The existing geospatial data were produced by public and private companies, with distinct standards and procedures, in different periods. The integration of these data is the major challenge for the Brazilian Spatial Data Infrastructure (INDE), and the OGC open standards play an important role in meeting this goal.

The Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium (OGRS) is a meeting dedicated to sharing knowledge, new solutions, methods, practices, ideas and trends in the field of geospatial information through the development and the use of free and open source software in both research and education. The second edition of the symposium, OGRS 2012, will take place from 24th to 26th October 2012 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. In keynote talks, regular presentations, workshops, discussion groups and a poster session with short presentations, the OGRS 2012 program provides opportunities for presenting results, principles, methods and practices.

At the OGC North America Forum Expo at Oracle's Reston, Virginia headquarters on September 19, 16 OGC vendor and integrator members showed their OGC open standards based solutions to 152 visitors representing 108 US federal agencies and organizations.

The exhibitors were:

Last week I attended the workshop “Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management” at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This was my first meeting I have attended that was fully dedicated to the discussion of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Lea Shanley, director of the Commons Lab, brought together top-notch panelists (see agenda) from government, university and industry. A great variety of topics were discussed, including the lack of privacy policy, simple tools to deal with information security (e.g. SSL – Secure Sockets Layer), and recommendations to make crowd sourcing successful.

The first ever OGC Nordic Interoperability Day was organized by OGC Nordic Forum together with ULI Geoforum, Sweden's national association for geographic information and GIS [0]. The event took place last week in Stockholm, Sweden and it was a big success, with over 70 participants from the Nordic countries together with guests from abroad. The full day event included presentations from OGC staff and  Nordic OGC members focusing on how to achieve interoperability of Geographic Information systems, services and content using OGC standards.

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.