The OGC Blog

David Schell, founder of the OGC, was at the top of the list of recipients of geospatial leadership awards at the Geospatial World Forum 2012, held 23-27 April in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Forum organizers focused on his role in transforming the geospatial industry through a consensus standards process.

The work of the OGC has relevance across a number of domains or communities of interest, but in no domain has there has been more work done to harness the power of open geospatial standards than in the domain of Spatial Data Infrastructures. Earlier this month I had the pleasure of joining Mark Reichardt, Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Association Board member and President and CEO of the OGC, at the Global Geospatial Conference in Quebec.

Brazil exports airplanes to France. Colombia exports coffee and cotton. Other countries in South America lead in other industries and markets, but not yet in Geospatial Standards. Standards, which are formal agreements published by a standard organization, are  the prime material of Spatial Data Infrastructures. Currently these come mostly from brainpower and requirements from Europe and the US. OGC has about 30 domain groups and 40 standard working groups. People from 450 organizations form these working groups. But, how many organizations in South America are OGC members? Only one. Fundação CPqD in Brazil since 2004.

A new standard being developed in the OGC has an important part in improving shared situational awareness. The candidate OGC Web Services (OWS) Context standard encodes the key elements of a common operating picture: the geographic area, an optional time range, and an ordered series of layers from different services or inline content. This allows a situational awareness view of one user to be passed to other users so that the same picture can be reconstructed. The context standard also allows catalogue queries and results from multiple catalogues, and web processing requests and results to be passed around easily.

With a successful Kickoff Workshop on 3-4 May, the development of the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot, Phase 5 (AIP-5), has begun. Representatives from the GEO organizations that responded to the AIP-5 Call for Participation (CFP) attended the workshop, which was hosted by UNEP at the International Environment House, Geneva.
 
Twenty-four responses to the AIP-5 CFP, representing over 60 organizations, were used to plan the kickoff. Sessions were held both for Societal Benefit Area topics and for Technical Areas. A major outcome of the workshop was the formation of working groups for AIP-5. 

The OGC's OWS-9 Interoperability Initiative, backed by 10 sponsors and 39 participating organizations, has started up with a May 14-16 Kickoff Event at George Mason University (GMU).

Prof Vikas Chandhoke, Dean of the College of Science, provided introductions on the first day, and Nadine Alameh, Ph.D., OWS-9 Initiative Manager, led the 3-day event.

There are several free and “for fee” apps in the iPhone and Android app marketplaces that leverage the Open GeoSMS standard recently approved by the OGC. One of the apps’ primary benefits is for people to send location-enabled texts to first responders in order to learn the best evacuation procedures during a crisis and/or to facilitate rescue.   Without the automatic inclusion of location in the texts, first responders often have difficulty determining the location of the sender of the text, and how best to respond.

Athina Trakas (OGC) will speak about OGC standards at the plenary session at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial in Central and East Europe (FOSS4G-CEE) & Geoinformatics, an international conference addressing geospatial technologies developed by, or relevant to, the Open Source community in Central and Eastern Europe. It will be held from 21st till 23rd May 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic.

OGC develops and publishes open standards not only for maps and geospatial analysis but also to help us share real time observed data from sensors. There is a very important activity within OGC called Sensor Web Enablement (SWE). The working groups within SWE advance standards that help plan, coordinate and implement sensors missions for everything from space-based Earth imaging and undersea ocean observatories to weather data and vehicle telematics. These standards play an essential role in using the Web to publish, discover, assess, access and manipulate sensors and live or stored sensor data, and in making the data useable in diverse applications. 

Back in 2000, the OGC Members determined that the W3C XLink recommendation was well suited to the requirements for GML 2.0 as well as other OGC standards. However, at that time, W3C did not have a XLink schema. Therefore, the OGC Members decided to define an OGC XLink schema that was based on the W3C XLink recommendation. This XLink schema is now used in numerous OGC standards (See below).