OGC Newsletter - October 2004

October 2004

CONTENTS
President's Message
News from the Chicago Meeting
Chicago Industry Day a Success
Event Update
Website of the Month

DEPARTMENTS:
IP Update, New Members, OGC In The News, Events, Contact, Subscribe/Unsubscribe


Back issues of OGC News are available.

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

Incubating Agreements

Information processing should be viewed
not just as a set of technologies, but also a collection of agreements.
Both begin with user requirements. OGC provides an environment and a
set of processes for devising new methodologies for interoperability
and information sharing. When a set of interoperability requirements is
brought to the OGC membership, our consensus processes allow us to
process these requirements in a creative way, not to build a product or
a piece of software, but to define and test new techniques and
solutions for addressing those requirements. New, creative solutions to
today's geospatial information sharing issues don't suddenly appear on
the market shelf as products. You need to bring your requirements and
work with others in a consensus process to create and agree upon the
detailed specifications. Making standards is a community process.


In 2001, New York City was one of several cities the EPA was
considering for an OGC Web Services testbed to advance sensor web
standards. The events of 9/11 and a request from the New York City
Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DOITT)
helped convince EPA that New York City was also a good location for
demonstrating information sharing as part of the OGC Web Services (OWS)
1.1 test bed. The EPA turned to OGC for help in establishing a
consistent set of methods, rules and procedures to help them integrate
and share the massive amount of information collected through
environmental sensor networks in New York City and also nationwide. EPA
contributed their requirements to OWS 1.1, and OWS 1.1 requirements
helped shape the draft Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) specifications as
well as OGC's specifications for Catalog Services, the Web Coverage
Service, and the Coverage Portrayal Service. All these specifications
are industry agreements about standard methods, rules and procedures
for information sharing and processing.

A consortium process
is a powerful agent for progress. As evidence, look at the technical
diversity of adopted OGC standards and our members' recent work with
Sensor Web Enablement, digital rights management and geospatial
semantic translation. No other organization has been so successful at
tackling such a broad range of problems involving institutional and
market needs for geospatial information technology integration.
Addressing an organization's, such as EPA's, few specific needs
typically results in increased value for a much broader collection of
information communities or market sectors.  EPA's priming of SWE,
for example, has significant value to utilities/SCADA, Earth
observation, critical infrastructure and homeland security, plant
security, emergency response, natural sciences, weather prediction and
warning and other areas of activity. One thing leads to another quite
logically, leading OGC to expand its scope to address the world's full
range of geospatial interoperability and information sharing
requirements. 

Mark Reichardt
President, OGC

NEWS FROM THE CHICAGO MEETING

The OGC Technical and Planning Committees (TC, PC) met in Chicago
during the week of September 13th. The meetings were sponsored by
NAVTEQ. The following key decisions were made:



1. Several potential OGC Interoperability Experiments (IE) were
identified. The three suggested experiments include a Sensor Alert
Interoperability Experiment, a Geoprocessing Services Interoperability
Experiment, and a GML-in-JPEG2000 Interoperability Experiment. Teams
are in the process of writing and submitting IE proposals to the OGC.



2. The TC approved the formation of the Web Feature Service Working Group and the GeoAPI Working Group.



3. The Geospatial Portal Reference Architecture (OGC 04-039) was
approved for release as a public OGC Discussion Paper. OGC is
requesting comments on this document from the public.



4. The members approved the document "URN namespace for the Open
Geospatial Consortium" (OGC  04-013r4) as a discussion paper. OGC
can submit the OGC URN proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) as a draft Request For Comment for Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority (IANA) consideration for a reserved OGC namespace.



5. The members approved release of the document "ebRIM Profile of
Catalogue Services 2.0 for HTTP Protocol Binding (Catalogue Services
for the Web - CSW" (04-017r) as a public OGC Discussion Paper.



6. The members approved release of the document "Geoprocessing Service"

(OGC Document 04-043) as a public OGC Discussion Paper.



The next OGC Technical and Planning Committee meetings will be held in New York City the week of January 17, 2005.



Carl Reed

Chief Technology Officer

CHICAGO INDUSTRY DAY A SUCCESS

OGC, NAVTEQ, the Chicago Geospatial Exchange and Stewart Graduate
School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology sponsored an
Industry Day event that brought together government, industry and
academic experts the geospatial requirements for several topical areas:
homeland security, location-based services, and vehicle services. The
discussion, held September 13th in Chicago, included current and future
direction and expectations for these industry segments. The event
focused on the role of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) in
government deployments, the expectations for the Vehicle Infrastructure
Integration (VII) and related standards activities underway to advance
these technology areas.

Approximately 75 attended the day
session. In addition to being an excellent forum for networking and
information exchange, this event provided attendees with a unique
opportunity to collaborate on the challenges and issues to be faced to
mobilize innovative technologies and interoperable solutions to address
government, business and consumer needs.

Sam A. Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Adoption Program

EVENT UPDATE

OGC members will be presenting a workshop at Interoperability 2004,
a conference presented by The Institute for Defense & Government
Advancement. The OGC-member panel will give an overview of a
standards-based interoperability framework and conduct a live
demonstration of its capabilities. The two day conference is October 20
– 21 in Washington, DC.

The third Emerging Technology
Summit (ETS III) has been rescheduled for the spring in Washington, DC.
The focus will be "Advancing the Sensor Web." This year's event is
sponsored by OGC, GITA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Look for
further details in the months to come.

WEBSITE OF THE MONTH

It's time to head south, just about as far as you can go, to
Antarctica. There's an island there called King George Island. Its online GIS
is currently hosted at, and coordinated by, the Institut f. Physische
Geographie, University Freiburg, Germany. Thirteen layers of data are
served up by a server that implements the Web Map Service specification.

Part of a map of King George Island, in Anartica.

The website
provides a slick interface with which to explore the data and posts the
WMS connection string
(http://www.geographie.uni-freiburg.de/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=/web/mapserver/kgis/WMS.map&)
right on the front page for those who want to access the data with a WMS client.


The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research's (SCAR) recommended
SCAR XXVI-6 document, which was adopted at the XXVIth Meeting of SCAR
in Tokyo, July 2000. The recommendation called for efforts to integrate
scientific objectives and for collaboration among the nations working
on King George Island. The GIS project grew out of that goal. Today,
via WMS, data is available to all countries for use in
multi-disciplinary applications.
 
Know of a website that
uses OpenGIS specifications to solve a real world problem or
demonstrates an interesting use? Drop the editor an e-mail with the
details including the URL, organization behind the website,
specifications used, technology used and the goal of the website.
adena@opengis.org

IP UPDATE

OGC Web Services (OWS)

The OGC Web Services 2 testbed
completed the public side of project activities with a natural
resources scenario demonstration on September 2, and a defense scenario
presentation on September 23rd. OWS-2 has produced a number of Draft
Interoperability Reports (DIPRs) that advance the state of interfaces
in several areas: Image Handling for Decision Support Systems, Common
Architecture, Information Interoperability and Open Location Services.
The DIPRs will be available to members this month. They are not
available to non-members at this time.

Work has begun to
define the scope of OWS-3. The next sponsor meeting is scheduled
November 19th. The Request for Proposal is planned for release in
January 2005.

NEW MEMBERS

OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.



ARC Seibersdorf research GmbH (Austria)

University



City of Phoenix (Arizona, US)

Government



Gosford City Council (Australia)

Government



International University Bremen (Germany)

University



Parsons Brinckerhoff (US)

Associate

OGC IN THE NEWS

- OGC in the Press

Pennsylvania Awarded Federal Information Technology Grant to Enhance Homeland Security Efforts
September 28, 2004

MapInfo Introduces Exponare, A Rapid Deployment Location-Intelligence Solution
September 16, 2004

IBM Releases DB2 Universal Database - Stinger
September 13, 2004

GeoLeaders to Distribute CarbonTools Globally under "No Limits" License
September 14, 2004

- OGC Press Releases

OGC Members Adopt Specification for Catalog Services
September 22, 2004

OGC Interoperability Demo Planned for SPATIAL-TECH 2004
September 21, 2004

EVENTS

October 2-8, 2004

Pallanza (Verbania), Italy

ISO/TC 211 19th Plenary and WG meetings



October 12, 2004

Arlington, VA

Second Annual Workshop on Web Enabled Modeling and Simulation



October 20-21

Washington, DC

Interoperability 2004



October 26

Detroit, MI

2004 Great Lakes Regional Data Exchange Conference



January 17-20, 2005

New York, NY

OGC Technical and Planning Committee Meetings



For further info on events please contact Greg Buehler.

CONTACT

Please send comments and suggestions to:

Adena Schutzberg
Editor, OGC News

Open Geospatial Consortium
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 2004 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.