November 2008
CONTENTS
President's Message: Gardels Award and Lifetime Achievement Award GivenOGC SurveyNews and Opinion From The BlogosphereWebsite of the MonthNews Items
DEPARTMENTS:
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PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE: GARDELS AWARD AND LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD GIVEN
Gardels Award & Lifetime Achievement Award Given
At our September meetings, it was an honor to play a role in presenting the 2008 Gardels Award to Mike Botts (Figure 1). In our process, the Board selects Gardels recipients from nominees recommended by the previous recipients of the Gardels Award.
The Gardels Award memorializes the spirit of Kenneth Gardels, a founding member and director of the OGC, who dreamt of making the world a better place through what he coined as "OpenGIS."
Through Mike's leadership and commitment, OGC members have advanced a tremendously important open standards framework that enables the discovery and tasking of sensors, as well as access to and fusion of sensor information -- referenced by location and time -- for improved understanding and decision making. This Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) family of standards extends the benefits of open standards to include a vast resource of networked sensors. Sensors provide a critical link between the real world and the digital world. SWE has become a key element in the global standards infrastructure that will support science, engineering and management throughout this century and beyond.
It was my great pleasure to also recognize Terry Fisher with an OGC Lifetime Achievement Award (Figure 2) - the second such award issued since OGC's inception. Terry, who recently retired from the GeoConnections (www.geoconnections.org/ ) program led by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), has been an active participant in the OGC since shortly after the Consortium was founded in 1994. Through his role in CEOS, he helped the international Earth observation community become a leading implementer community for OGC, and he guided "Team Canada" companies in contributing their critical standards expertise in the OGC and becoming leaders internationally with standards-based geoprocessing products.
The contributions made by Mike and Terry are already having important positive effects in the world. Broad adoption of SWE is underway in climate and ocean science, emergency management, and defense and intelligence communities. Strong CGDI (Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure) public/private partnering in Canada has yielded nationwide implementations of OGC interoperability and has resulted in an extremely active information technology and user base of membership in the OGC.
Please join me in congratulating Mike and Terry for their accomplishments and their ongoing commitment to interoperability and the mission of the OGC.
-- Mark Reichardt
Figure 1. Mark Reichardt (left), CEO and President of OGC, presenting the 2008 Gardels Award to Mike Botts.
Figure 2. (l-r) Mark Reichardt, Jeff Labonté, director of the GeoConnections program, and Terry Fisher (recently retired from GeoConnections), recipient of the 2008 OGC Lifetime Achievement Award.
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OGC is conducting a broad survey of the geospatial community regarding the OGC mission and standards usage. OGC collaborated with researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of North Carolina Charlotte to develop the survey. The survey will not only provide valuable research on standards development organizations and standards effectiveness, it will also help the Consortium in addressing future community interoperability needs. Please help us with our interoperability mission by taking the survey at http://www.surveyshare.com/survey/take/?sid=79356. Please also pass the link along to others you believe should take part in the process as well.
If you have any questions about the survey, please email the research team directly. You will find their contact information on the survey website.
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NEWS AND OPINION FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE
On 30 October, Bengt Fein blogged on the Pan European eParticipation Network, Pep-net, about DEMOS-Plan and its successful implementation in Hamburg. DEMOS-plan is an internet tool that enables participation in the land use planning process by all interested parties, including public administrators, government departments, companies and citizens. Such public participation is required by law in EU member states when the environment will be affected by a plan. OGC standards enable users to visualize base maps, maps involving current use, traffic proposals, and other themes individually and in combination.
Cameron Shorter's post of 10 October, "Community Schemas: Making sense out of disparate datasets," points out that integrating datasets which use different terms and attributes to describe the same data is a challenge. A solution? Define a community schema for a domain. He mentions a number of OGC standards and schema, including Observation and Measurement (O&M), Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Geography Markup Language (GML) and CityGML.
On September 30th, Jeff Harrison's post, "GML-powered Weather Hits United States," described the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) from the National Weather Service, available as an experimental Web Feature Service (WFS).
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provides WMS access to the National Flood Hazard Layer (NFHL), see https://hazards.fema.gov/femaportal/wps/portal/NFHLWMS for details. Since NFHL was introduced in August, both it and the previously available flood WMS have been available. Note that FEMA will withdraw the flood WMS from service on November 30, 2008. Users should change their applications to use the NFHL WMS to avoid an interruption in service.
For the titles of layers, the names of the features included in each layer, and the map symbols for the features, see "Flood Data Symbology for Web Map Services." The NFHL database contains data depicting flood hazard information, and the supporting data used to develop the information. The primary hazard classifications are the 1 percent-annual-chance flood event, the 0.2 percent-annual-chance flood event, and areas of minimal flood hazard. Flood hazard and supporting data are developed using specifications for horizontal control consistent with 1:12,000-scale mapping. The service provides map images geo-referenced to the Earth's surface using the North American Datum of 1983, Geodetic Reference System 80 coordinate system.
The service organizes the data in layers. The layers display information at map scales appropriate for the data. Status information and river sub-basins are displayed at map scales smaller than 1:300,000, regional overviews at map scales between 1:300,000 and 1:32,000, and detailed flood hazard maps at map scales of 1:32,000 and larger. The "Scalehint" item in the Capabilities file for the Web Map Service encodes the scale range for maps for a layer.
The service complies with OGC WMS Interface Specification 1.1.1. The service responds to the GetCapabilities, GetMap, and GetFeatureInfo operations defined by the specification.
The Mapping Information Platform (MIP) User Care section includes -- in addition to FAQs -- training materials, guides and documentation. Requests for access and for support are also available here.
Figure 3. FEMA's Flood Map Viewer.
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Eligibility for Free OGC Trademark License Expands to Include Proprietary Software!
The OGC Compliance Testing Program (http://www.opengeospatial.org/compliance) enables developers to test whether their products comply with OpenGIS® Implementation Standards. A new compliance test suite is developed for every new OGC standard, and every new compliance test suite must be beta tested before it is made publicly available.
Normally, after a vendor has successfully completed compliance testing, the vendor pays a trademark license fee to use OGC's trademarks or certification marks to show customers that they have achieved compliance with that OGC standard. The news here is that now the OGC offers free Trademark licenses for the first three products that pass 100% of the required parts of any of the beta tests (starting with tests developed under OWS-5), and this includes proprietary as well as open source software. It pays to be an early adopter!
Compliance & Interoperability Testing & Evaluation (CITE) is an ongoing initiative of the OGC that develops tests for OGC standards, and makes those tests available for online testing on the CITE portal (http://cite.opengeospatial.org/).
Before a CITE test suite is released and available for certification, the OGC now requires that three products pass 100% of the required tests. Until that time the test suite is considered to be in beta testing. Previously, only one product had to pass the required tests, and only an open source reference implementation qualified for the free trademark license. Now, three products-either proprietary or open source-must pass the required tests in order for the test suite to move out of beta.
Once beta testing is complete, the three products that passed the test suite are certified; anyone else may exercise the tests and apply for certification to use the OGC compliance certification mark with their product.
The following test suites are currently in the beta period. They may be exercised from http://cite.geoenterpriselab.com/teamengine/ .
- Catalog Services for Web (CSW) 2.0.2 Compliance Test Suite
- Sensor Observation Service (SOS) 1.0 Compliance Test Suite
- Sensor Planning Service (SPS) 1.0 Compliance Test Suite
- Web Coverage Service (WCS) 1.0.0 port to the TEAM engine
- Web Coverage Service (WCS) 1.1.1
- Web Feature Service (WFS) 1.1.0 with XLink support
- Web Registry Service (WRS) 1.0
Please try these tests and if you have any problems or issues, discuss them on the OGC CITE Forum discussion group. Understanding of the value of interoperable standards is growing, which can be expected to lead to more and more procurements requiring certification. Consider taking advantage of this program to be one of the first to market with a free OGC certified compliant product! In the process, you will help support a consortium that advances your business!
CGDI Video Is on OGC Website - and on YouTube
The OGC website has nine-and-a-half-minute videos in English and French about OGC's Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) Interoperability Project (IP). (The videos are also on YouTube, which will make them accessible to a wider audience.) The CGDI IP developed a partnership network across Canada. OGC's Web Feature / Web Map Service standards provided multiple vendors access to the most current and authoritative data; versioning was avoided and duplication was minimized while currency was maintained. This video highlights the collaboration, the concepts and the technology behind the network.
GeoConnections will also be making the video available in DVD format.
NGA Makes Data from Hurricane Katrina Available to the Public
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency uses OGC's Web Map Service (WMS) to make its data accessible. The general public can access (only) legacy Hurricane Katrina data using the WMS feed. Instructions are provided for Google EarthTM, DappleTM, NASA's World WindTM, and ESRI ArcViewTM.
Delicious OGC Documents
An effort is underway to make OGC documents more accessible to everyone. The idea is to navigate OGC documents using Delicious. Contribute by tagging your own important OGC documents with ogcdoc, plus other keywords such as {filter georss gml owc ows sas sdi sensorml sld sos styling swe wcs wfs wmc wms wps}. More details are available at http://www.ogcnetwork.net/ogcdoc. To see documents that have already been bookmarked and tagged, go to http://delicious.com/tag/ogcdoc.
OGC Network Hosts Tutorial "Using a Web Feature Service"
Learning resources available on OGC Network continue to expand. October saw the addition of "Using a Web Feature Service." The five sections of the tutorial are Introduction, GET versus POST requests, Operations, WFS Clients, and Final Words.
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OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.
CLS(Associate) (France)
ESRI France SA(Associate) (France)
Federal Express Corporation(Associate) (United States)
GEOSYSTEMS France(Small Company) (France)
Sprague Technologies, Inc. dba PCAvionics(Small Company) (United States)
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OGC in the News
The November issue of Computer, a publication of the IEEE Computer Society, includes an article by Craig Lee of the Open Grid Forum (OGF) and OGC's George Percivall, Executive Director of Interoperability Architecture: "Standards-Based Computing Capabilities for Distributed Geospatial Applications." Because geospatial data repositories involve distributed locations, a variety of formats, and ever-increasing data volumes, researchers will benefit from standards for distributed geospatial computing. The article provides a good overview of the current situation and introduction to the collaborative efforts OGC and OGF are undertaking. One sidebar describes five grid-based geospatial computing initiatives and another covers four specific OGC-OGF integration initiatives.
"Spatial Information Technology" in the November issue of GIM International mentions a real-estate website that has been developed using OGC standards (WMS, WFS, WCS, WPS); the site offers planning, traffic and environment information from distributed servers.
"Data Sharing for Incident Management" in the November issue of GEOconnexion International introduces Geospatial Instant Messenger (GeoIM) as a tool that helps analysts create a common operating picture. GeoIM can be used to publish data which can be automatically output as a WMS, KML or other layer, and can be used to consume WMS, WCS and other data. GeoIM and the TITAN Viewer are the two main components of ERDAS TITAN.
GIM International carried a story on 3 November about "OneGeology," the flagship project for the UN International Year of Planet Earth 2008. OneGeology uses GeoSciML, the OpenGIS Web Map Service (WMS) Interface Standard and other OGC standards.
On 8 October, GeoInformatics published "Open Location Services improve Logistics in Disaster Management," telling the story of the creation of Emergency Route Service to help the United Nations Joint Logistics Center organize its operations in dealing with the devastation caused by Hurricane Ike in Haiti. Several OGC standards are used behind the scenes, including OpenLS Route Service; OpenLS Utility Service (Geocoder / Reverse Geocoder); OpenLS Directory Service; Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS).
Ideas in Transit published "Open multi-modal trip planners appearing" on 7 October. Both OpenRouteService and Your Navigation have been launched in UK. The user can pick a start location and a destination and choose whether the trip is by foot, bicycle or car. OpenRouteService uses OGC's Location Services Standard, OpenLS.
"Geo-Information Connectivity," in Directions Magazine 6 October, identifies standards as one of five enablers of the "increasing pervasiveness of geographic information in our society ..." It describes the OGC process of developing consensus standards as efficient, and attributes the efficiency to the OGC Interoperability Program.
"Intelligent GIS" in the October issue of GIS Development describes geospatial intelligence as a new discipline whose development arose from shifts in the strategic environment, regional conflicts and technology advancements. It describes the importance of OGC standards -- naming WMS, WFS, WCS, CS-W and SLD -- in enabling the dynamic growth of C4ISR infrastructure. And the closing paragraph says, "It is incumbent upon architects of the next generation of C4ISR to understand how OGC interoperability can enhance our national security."
The October issue of GIM International includes "Easing the Way for GIS," featuring the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Students and faculty at all universities, colleges and schools in Norway have access to Norge Digitalt, Norway's national spatial data infrastructure (NSDI). The Norwegian University of Life Sciences has been involved in ISO and OGC standards work. Its early access to OGC standards has enabled the faculty to contribute to the development of and gain benefits from the NSDI.
Also in the October issue of GIM International is "Open Standards, Free Geodata and 3D," which describes the use of free user-provided data together with OGC standards -- Web Processing Service, Web 3D Service, Sensor Observation Service - to contribute 3D analysis and visualization in disaster management.
On 30 September, GeoPlace published "GRID Computing and the Geospatial Web" by OGC's Chief Technology Officer Carl Reed. Discussing collaboration of OGC with the Open Grid Forum (OGF), the article points out that the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) Interface Standard is of particular interest to the GRID community. OGC and OGF have signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that defines particular areas for collaboration, such as the integration of federated OGC-based catalogs and data repositories with GRID data movement tools as well as the integration of WPS with GRID workflow-management tools and a range of back-end processing environments.
OGC Press Releases
OGC Members Demo Sensor Web Interoperability at Oceans Conference
November 24, 2008
GeoConnections Releases CGDI Interoperability Pilot Demo Video
November 24, 2008
The OGC(R) Announces Updated OGC Reference Model
November 17, 2008
The OGC(R) Announces Successful OWS-6 Testbed Kick-off Event
November 10, 2008
David Arctur Joins OGC as Director, Interoperability Programs
November 10, 2008
OGC Standards Are the "Bedrock" of Global Geology Mapping Project
October 28, 2008
Webinar Features Geography Markup Language
October 10, 2008
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November 24-26, 2008
Workshop on the use of GIS/OGC standards in meteorology - ECMWF
Shinfield Park, UK
December 1-5, 2008
ISO/TC 211 27th Plenary
Tsukuba, Japan
December 1-4, 2008
December '08 OGC Technical Committee Meeting
Valencia, Spain
December 3-4, 2008
The User and the GEOSS Architecture XXV - Valencia
Valencia, Spain
December 4-5, 2008
December '08 OGC Planning Committee Meeting
Valencia, Spain
February 10-14, 2009
2009 Map World Forum
Hyderabad, India
April 19-22, 2009
GITA GIS Conference
Tampa, Florida
May 28-30, 2009
ISO/TC211 28th Plenary
Molde, Norway
June 15-20, 2009
GSDI 11: Spatial Data Infrastructure Convergence: Building SDI Bridges to Address Global Challenges
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
For further info on events please contact Greg Buehler.
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CONTACT
Please send comments and suggestions to:
Tina Cary
Editor, OGC News
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
35 Main Street Suite 5
Wayland MA 01778-5037
USA Phone: +1 508 655 5858
Fax: +1 508 655 2237
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Copyright 2008 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.