March 2013. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) Land Development Domain Working Group in partnership with buildingSMART International http://www.buildingsmart.org/ will host the inaugural Civil Summit as part of the OGC Technical and Planning Committee meeting in Abu Dhabi. The Summit will be held Monday, 18 March 2013, 08:00 – 17:00.


This event will focus on the current need and future opportunities for open standards in Civil and Land Development. Representatives from buildingSMART International and buildingSMART Middle East Chapter will be providing an update from their USA meeting being held 12 March in Waltham and activities in the Middle East.

Recent years have seen a significant increase in demand for interoperability between Spatial, Civil and BIM in daily workflows. The aim of this industry gathering is to facilitate open discussion and actions for future development. Participants from industry-leading organizations around the world will engage in interactive discussions, lightning talks, and inspiring presentations. This event is free and open to all who would like to participate.

Join the conversation! This one-day Civil Summit is the best opportunity in 2013 to engage in Civil and Land Development standards.

Call for Presentations

We are seeking presentations on: existing workflows (what is working – what can be improved) from the viewpoint of civil engineers, from a BIM perspective, Planning and Operations, Policy and Law (Government), software vendors and more are welcome. What are the emerging best practices for data and services interoperability? Who is leading the way with technical innovation and market adoption? What is happening with LandXML? If you would like to present please make your submission no later than 12th March to Bart De Lathouwer at bdelathouwer [at] opengeospatial [dot] org.

Agenda

Draft Agenda can be found here.RegistrationPlease register via this link.This registration is for the Civil Summit only. If you are attending the OGC Technical and Planning Committee meetings you will need to register separately via the OGC website.

Key Dates

12 March 2013: Submissions for Presentations
18 March 2013: Civil Summit 2013

Venue

The summit will be held on Monday, March 18, 2013 in Abu Dhabi, UAE in conjunction with the OGC Technical Committee Meeting. For details on venue and accommodation information please check the Abu Dhabi Technical Committee information page on the OGC website: http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1303tc.

Contact

Program organizers: Scott Simmons, CACI and OGC 3DIM  and Bart De Lathouwer, OGC

4 March 2013. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced the formation of a new OGC Technical Committee Standards Working Group (SWG). The purpose of this SWG is to progress the GeoSciML data model and application schema for geoscience information interchange to the state of an adopted OGC standard. The OGC members convening this group invite the public to comment on the GeoSciML 4.0 SWG charter (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=51418) and will consider comments received before 8 April 2013.

 The SWG will consist of interested parties from geological surveys, academic institutions, and commercial and government organizations that utilize geoscience information.

Beginning in 2003, GeoSciML development began under the auspices of the Interoperability Working Group of the Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information, a commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences.

To improve the ability to query and exchange digital geoscientific information between data providers and users, GeoSciML defines, not a database structure, but rather a format for geoscience data interchange. Organizations can provide a GeoSciML interface to their existing data base systems, with no restructuring of internal databases. The originators of GeoSciML first developed a common conceptual data model, to which data held in existing databases can be mapped. GeoSciML identifies the objects being described (e.g. ‘geological faults’), their properties (e.g. ‘displacement’) and the relations between objects (e.g. ‘faults are a type of Geologic Structure’) in a model that was developed using Universal Modeling Language (UML), an ISO standard. From this model, the GeoSciML data encoding was developed based on the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML – ISO DIS 19136) Encoding Standard for representation of features and geometry, and also the OGC Observations and Measurements Encoding Standard for observational data.

At present the scope is limited to the types of information generally shown on geological maps, along with boreholes and field observations.

Future enhancements to the GeoSciML 4.0 Encoding standard will allow OWS to support provisioning of GeoSciML 4.0s throughout an enterprise or information community.

The conveners of the GeoSciML SWG are Oliver Raymond of Geoscience Australia and Stephen Richard of the Arizona Geological Survey. 

The following people support this proposal and are committed to the Charter and projected meeting schedule. Others may join this list before the SWG is officially chartered, these members are known as SWG Founding or Charter members:

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 485 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

28 February 2013.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is pleased to announce that The SI Organization, Inc. (the SI) has raised its membership level from Technical Committee level to Principal level. 

The SI delivers integrated geospatial data, innovative products and mission solutions to global markets.

“We recognize the value of engaging in the OGC at a higher level to cover not only the technical issues but also to have a say in OGC’s market direction and a voice in the advancement of OGC’s policies and procedures,” said Deb Oliver, the SI’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.

“The SI is a prominent systems engineering and integration firm, and Principal Membership in the OGC affords the company an increased leadership role in the Consortium,” said Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC.  “We look forward to their continued involvement in OGC’s Technical Committee, and we welcome their voting participation in OGC’s Planning Committee. The Planning Committee is the final approval authority for OGC standards, as well as the body responsible for exploring market trends relevant to OGC’s mission, and for assuring that OGC’s policies and procedures remain effective and agile in a changing technology environment.    

“OGC has an extraordinary value in helping industry, agencies and academia manage the growth in unstructured and structured information, as well as capitalizing on the opportunity that data presents,” said Barry Barlow, the SI’s Chief Technology Officer. “OGC addresses and promotes solutions for interoperability challenges so that anyone can extract value from the data at their disposal.”

About the SI

The SI delivers integrated geospatial data, innovative products and mission solutions to global markets. The company has a 40-year heritage providing systems engineering, innovative technology and integrated solutions. The SI employs approximately 2,000 people around the world. For more information, visit the SI’s website at http://www.thesiorg.com.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

25 February 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has adopted "Semantic annotations in OGC standards" as an OGC Best Practice.

OGC standards provide standard ways of locating and transporting network-resident geospatial data and ways of locating and invoking geospatial services. Without proper descriptions of these resources, however, use of the resources is limited to small user groups. To make a geospatial resource more widely discoverable, assessable and useful, resource providers must annotate the resource with descriptive metadata that can be read and understood by a broad audience. Without such metadata, people will neither be able to find the resource using search engines nor will they be able to evaluate if the discovered resource satisfies their current information need.

This OGC Best Practice explains preferred methods of providing semantic annotation in OGC Web Service environments. It explains how to use the OGC Capabilities-Document and descriptions of feature types, coverages and processes to publish, discover, access, invoke, and finally visualize spatial data. It extends existing OGC standards and applies standards from other organizations such as the W3C to OGC Standards.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

20 February 2013 - The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) has announced a Call for Participation (CFP) in the 6th phase of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP-6). AIP-6 aims to increase the use of GEOSS resources by end-users. An end-user might be, for example, a farmer in a developing nation whose cell phone app accesses an online service that supplies planting advice and market forecasts based on sophisticated processing of data acquired by satellites, local Internet-connected sensors, and social networks. 

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) provides leadership in AIP-6 and invites OGC members and other organizations to respond to the CFP. The CFP document is available at: http://earthobservations.org/geoss_call_aip.shtml.

GEO was launched in response to calls for action by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and by the G8 (Group of Eight) leading industrialized countries. GEOSS technical architecture, data sharing agreements, capacity building and user engagement programs comprise a durable platform for exploiting the growing potential of Earth observations to support decision making in an increasingly complex and environmentally stressed world.

Through integration with the technology resources in the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI), AIP-6 will demonstrate how users can now begin to benefit from a decade of GEO activities. The specific goals of AIP-6 are to:

1. Increase Societal Benefit Area (SBA) use of GEOSS resources by end- users
2. Increase the availability of GEOSS resources
3. Focus on benefits and usability for Developing Countries
4. Strengthen previous GEO results and technical achievements

AIP-6 builds on the results and infrastructure set up in prior AIPs.

The AIP-6 schedule will support the GEO Plenary and Ministerial Summit, to be held 15-17 January 2014 in Geneva, Switzerland. AIP-6 will also support the Sprint to Summit initiative from the GEO Implementation Boards. A Kickoff Workshop for AIP-6 will be held from 28-29 March in Washington, D.C.

This CFP invites GEO Members and Participating Organizations to participate in AIP-6 through activities such as:

• Leading GEOSS SBA demonstrations
• Tutorial development as expert guidance to GEOSS SBA users
• Client applications for GEOSS users to download and utilize GEOSS 
resources
• Support of GEO legal interoperability efforts, e.g., user registration
• Integration and testing to enable GCI promote helper applications for 
users
• Enhancements to the GEOSS test facility

Responses to this CFP are requested by 15 March 2013. Discussion and clarification of the CFP and the initiation of AIP-6 will be the topic of weekly teleconferences. Agenda and logistics for these telecons are posted at http://www.ogcnetwork.net/AIPtelecons.

The Point of Contact for the AIP initiative is Bart De Lathouwer, bdelathouwer [at] opengeospatial.org.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Learn more about the OGC at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact. See our recent "What is the OGC?" video.

GEO, a voluntary partnership of 156 governments and international organizations, is coordinating efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS. See http://earthobservations.org/about_geo.shtml.