What is the OGC?
OGC Newsletter - July 2006
July 2006
CONTENTS
President's Message
News From The Edinburgh Meeting
News and Opinion From The Blogosphere
Upcoming Conferences
W3C Geospatial Incubator Group
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
Kenn Gardels' Dream Fulfilled
Last week, at the evening reception at the 57th Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Technical Committee and Planning Committee Meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Kenneth D. Gardels Award was presented to Simon Cox, Principal Research Scientist, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Minerals and Exploration, Perth, Australia.
On behalf of OGC's board, members, staff and stakeholders around the world, I want to once again thank the 2006 Gardels award winner Simon Cox for his contributions to the OpenGIS(R) Geography Markup Language (GML), Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and Web Feature Service (WFS) specifications; for his mature technical counsel in committee deliberations; for his invaluable work to help OGC standards receive ISO standing; and for his long-time advocacy of OGC and interoperability in Australia. The award recognizes Simon's extraordinary personal commitment and dedicated participation in OGC programs, as well as the quality of his leadership and the esteem in which he is held throughout the OGC community.
As some of you may be aware, The Kenneth D. Gardels award is a gold medallion presented each year by the OGC Board of Directors to an individual who has made exemplary contributions to the OGC's consensus standards process.
Kenn Gardels, a founding member and a director of the OGC, coined the phrase "Open GIS". Kenn died of liver cancer in 1999 at the age of 44. He was well known in the field of GIS and was involved over the years in many programs related to GIS and the environment. He is remembered for his principles, courage, and humility, and for his accomplishments in promoting spatial technologies as tools for preserving the environment and serving human needs.
Each year, previous recipients of the award recommend a list of candidate recipients. Then the Board of Directors makes a choice from this list. It is a humbling challenge to make this selection, as there are so many dedicated members. But this is a most rewarding difficulty, because it is a dramatic proof of the continuity and vitality of spirit that Kenn's vision has given to our organization. Kenn's vision is continually renewed and multiplied by the commitment and accomplishments of the hundreds of people who work in our process, people who are each in their own way advancing geospatial technologies to address or help others address a variety of tough issues facing society.
The Gardels Award Ceremony gains in emotional power each year because it takes place against the manifest backdrop of growing adoption of OGC standards in the global community. The vision that Kenn and the other founders of OGC put forward has become a reality, and this reality continues to expand as dedicated members develop specifications and as users around the world use them to solve important problems and make better decisions.
I am saddened by the fact that I did not have the privilege of knowing Kenn. But through conversations with OGC directors, members and staff, I feel that I have gotten to know Kenn, and I carry with me a vivid picture of his life and legacy. I want to thank Simon Cox and all the past Gardels recipients for their role in keeping Kenn's legacy burning bright. Indeed Kenn's vision lives on in the work of all OGC members and those around the globe who are implementing OGC standards to improve decision making for environmental, economic and social issues. In their work, there is a reflection of Kenn's California license plate, which carried an abbreviated form of the phrase, "Think globally, act locally."
Mark Reichardt
President
OGC
NEWS FROM THE EDINBURGH MEETING
Combining record attendance (215), beautiful weather (yes, in Scotland), and high energy, the TC meetings in Edinburgh were incredibly productive. The schedule for the week was so full that a number of Birds of a Feather (BOF) meetings and demonstrations were held all day every day in the common meeting area. Six new Revision Working Groups were created (Web Processing Service, SensorML, Web Map Service, Catalogue 2.0 ebRim and 19115 Application Profiles, and GeoDRM Reference Model). There is a good chance that by the end of 2006 eight new OpenGIS Specifications will be formally released.
There were 22 Technical Committee (TC) and Planning Committee (PC) votes. Some of the key votes were:
Carl Reed
CTO
OGC
NEWS AND OPINION FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE
Discussions of OGC specifications and interfaces are popping up all over the blogosphere (the world of blogs). A few posts worthy of note follow.
Marine GIS Analyst Rajesh is looking for others interested in a Hydrographic Marine GIS Application schema for GML. He notes:
"We used GML 3.0 for developing GIS application schema for conversion of existing Open GIS format data into XML/GML and displayed through SVG viewer. I am very much interested in developing a Hydrographic Marine GIS Application schema using GML Technologies."
Daanish at the NovaGeomatics blog attended GeoTec in Ottawa last month. He sums up what he felt was a consensus there.
"They decided before we can forge ahead with new things like sensor nets, we must perfect existing technologies to be able to handle new things. Basically they want to build a strong base from which new things can be built. Instead of focusing on 'corporate toys' like Google Earth, we need to get back to basics and perfect the inner workings of various technologies like GML, WMS, and WFS. To those at the conference, the current technologies are too slow, too bulky, and too rough around the edges to earn mainstream acceptance."
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
Together with OGC, IEEE and ESA, the European Union Satellite Centre (EUSC) is organizing a conference on Image Information Mining for Security and Intelligence on November 27-8, 2006 at EUSC, Torrejon air base, Madrid. The conference is free, until space is filled. Details and the call for papers, due July 15, are online.
An error in the last OGC News had the date of the ISO/TC211 plenary in Riyadh as the 11-15th of July. It is in fact the 14-15th of November 2006. We regret the error.
W3C GEOSPATIAL INCUBATOR GROUP
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the creation of the Geospatial Incubator Group on July 5th. The group will address "issues of location and geographical properties of resources for the Web of today and tomorrow."
Sponsors include W3C Members including the Open Geospatial Consortium, Oracle Corporation, SRI International, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI).
W3C Members may join and non-members may request a role as an invited expert to participate.
Joshua Lieberman, of Traverse Technologies, is the chair.
WEBSITE OF THE MONTH
Geoportal ZU, also known as the Czech Land Survey Office Geoportal, uses the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Services (WMS), and features an Internet store for customers to order digital and paper maps as well as Web Services for agencies to download geospatial datasets of the Czech Republic. Any WMS viewer can be used to access the data sets, which requires a fee for non-government users. The site offers details on how to access sample data.
The Web portal was recognized by the board of independent industry experts as "The Best of Geo-Application of The Year in 2004." Intergraph's GeoMedia technology is used for the integration of the various formats in which the Czech Land Survey geographic data is stored, the publication of vector and raster data to meet the WMS specification and the automatic export of the data in desired formats.
Know of a website that uses OpenGIS specifications to solve a real world problem or demonstrates an interesting use? Drop the adena [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (editor) an e-mail with the details including the URL, organization behind the website, specifications used, technology used and the goal of the website.
IP UPDATE
OGC Web Service, Phase 4 (OWS-4)
The OGC held the OWS-4 Initiative Kickoff meeting at Oracle Corporation in Reston, Virginia on June13-16, 2006.
Jack Pellicci provided leadership and inspiring words to kickoff this meeting. Oracle's Wendy Choate and Ann Fonfara managed the facilities and monitored the daily meetings. More than 110 people participated in the four day meetings.
OWS-4 builds on activities of previous initiatives and to address sponsors' interests and needs which included sensor webs, geospatial digital rights management, geospatial semantics and knowledge management.
The OWS-4 Initiative has been organized around the following threads to address sponsors' requirements and continuation of OGC initiatives of the past.
Most of these threads represent continuation of work begun in previous initiatives adding new requirements to continue progress towards maturation of existing specifications and to define new candidate specifications. Others seek to extend the integration of technologies in new areas including CAD/GIS/BIM. This thread seeks to move toward seamless access to information across the extremes of spatial scales, across the different semantic domains and across the lifecycle of a project.
Following the opening plenary, Thread Architects and participants conducted four days of face-to-face meetings to begin work in each thread. A number of cross thread discussions were held to explore technical aspects affecting more than one thread. Among the cross-thread topics covered were:
Lewis Leinenweber
BAE Systems
OWS-4 Initiative Manager
For more information about the Interoperability Program, contact percivall [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (George Percivall).
NEW MEMBERS
OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.
Blue Marble Geographics (U.S.)
Small Company
Smart Sensor Systems
Small Company
Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) (U.S.)
Research Institute
OGC IN THE NEWS
- OGC in the Press
Advances in Geosciences
Special Issue on Earth System Science Data
June 2006
CityGML: An Open Standard for 3D City Models
Thomas Kolbe and Sam Bacharach
Directions Magazine
June 21, 2006
Cadcorp announces three new, free plug-ins for XML-based data
June 2, 2006
Learn to Distinguish "Open Source" and "Open Standards"
Sam Bacharach
GeoWorld
May 2006
Open Source and Open Standards in Geospatial Technologies
Adena Schutzberg
GeoInformatics
April/May 2006
- OGC Press Releases
OGC Web Services for GEOSS Demonstrated at Workshop in China
June 15, 2006
EVENTS
July 24-28, 2006
Vancouver, Canada
GeoWeb 2006
CONTACT
Please send comments and suggestions to:
SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
To subscribe send mail to: newsletter-request [at] opengeospatial [dot] org
with "subscribe" (no quotes) in the subject.
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with "unsubscribe" (no quotes) in the subject.
Visit our subscription page
CONTENTS
President's MessageNews From The Edinburgh MeetingNews and Opinion From The BlogosphereUpcoming ConferencesW3C Geospatial Incubator GroupWebsite of the MonthDEPARTMENTS:
IP Update, New Members, OGC In The News, Events, Contact, Subscribe/Unsubscribe
Back issues of OGC News are available.
 |
PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
Kenn Gardels' Dream Fulfilled
Last week, at the evening reception at the 57th Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Technical Committee and Planning Committee Meetings in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Kenneth D. Gardels Award was presented to Simon Cox, Principal Research Scientist, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Minerals and Exploration, Perth, Australia.
On behalf of OGC's board, members, staff and stakeholders around the world, I want to once again thank the 2006 Gardels award winner Simon Cox for his contributions to the OpenGIS(R) Geography Markup Language (GML), Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and Web Feature Service (WFS) specifications; for his mature technical counsel in committee deliberations; for his invaluable work to help OGC standards receive ISO standing; and for his long-time advocacy of OGC and interoperability in Australia. The award recognizes Simon's extraordinary personal commitment and dedicated participation in OGC programs, as well as the quality of his leadership and the esteem in which he is held throughout the OGC community.
As some of you may be aware, The Kenneth D. Gardels award is a gold medallion presented each year by the OGC Board of Directors to an individual who has made exemplary contributions to the OGC's consensus standards process.
Kenn Gardels, a founding member and a director of the OGC, coined the phrase "Open GIS". Kenn died of liver cancer in 1999 at the age of 44. He was well known in the field of GIS and was involved over the years in many programs related to GIS and the environment. He is remembered for his principles, courage, and humility, and for his accomplishments in promoting spatial technologies as tools for preserving the environment and serving human needs.
Each year, previous recipients of the award recommend a list of candidate recipients. Then the Board of Directors makes a choice from this list. It is a humbling challenge to make this selection, as there are so many dedicated members. But this is a most rewarding difficulty, because it is a dramatic proof of the continuity and vitality of spirit that Kenn's vision has given to our organization. Kenn's vision is continually renewed and multiplied by the commitment and accomplishments of the hundreds of people who work in our process, people who are each in their own way advancing geospatial technologies to address or help others address a variety of tough issues facing society.
The Gardels Award Ceremony gains in emotional power each year because it takes place against the manifest backdrop of growing adoption of OGC standards in the global community. The vision that Kenn and the other founders of OGC put forward has become a reality, and this reality continues to expand as dedicated members develop specifications and as users around the world use them to solve important problems and make better decisions.
I am saddened by the fact that I did not have the privilege of knowing Kenn. But through conversations with OGC directors, members and staff, I feel that I have gotten to know Kenn, and I carry with me a vivid picture of his life and legacy. I want to thank Simon Cox and all the past Gardels recipients for their role in keeping Kenn's legacy burning bright. Indeed Kenn's vision lives on in the work of all OGC members and those around the globe who are implementing OGC standards to improve decision making for environmental, economic and social issues. In their work, there is a reflection of Kenn's California license plate, which carried an abbreviated form of the phrase, "Think globally, act locally."
Mark Reichardt
President
OGC
|
NEWS FROM THE EDINBURGH MEETING
Combining record attendance (215), beautiful weather (yes, in Scotland), and high energy, the TC meetings in Edinburgh were incredibly productive. The schedule for the week was so full that a number of Birds of a Feather (BOF) meetings and demonstrations were held all day every day in the common meeting area. Six new Revision Working Groups were created (Web Processing Service, SensorML, Web Map Service, Catalogue 2.0 ebRim and 19115 Application Profiles, and GeoDRM Reference Model). There is a good chance that by the end of 2006 eight new OpenGIS Specifications will be formally released.
There were 22 Technical Committee (TC) and Planning Committee (PC) votes. Some of the key votes were:
- Approval of the OGC Architecture Board (OAB) Policies and Procedures. A call for nominations to the OAB will be made shortly. The OAB will be the focal point for OGC standards life cycle management.
- Approval of an OGC policy position on SOAP and WSDL. Going forward, all OGC Web Service related specifications will have a mandatory annex defining a SOAP binding and a WSDL expression of that binding.
- The Web Feature Service (WFS) Gazetteer Application Profile was approved as an OGC Best Practices document.
- The following were approved for release as OGC Best Practices Documents: Web Coverage Processing Service, Observations and Measurements, "Definition identifier URNs in OGC namespace", and Sensor Alert Service. Best Practices documents represent official positions of the OGC and replace what were known as Recommendation Papers.
- Approval of both the "Introduction to GeoRSS" and the "Sensor Web Enablement" as official OGC White Papers for public release.
- Seven other documents were also approved for release as OGC Discussion Papers.
Carl Reed
CTO
OGC
|
NEWS AND OPINION FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE
Discussions of OGC specifications and interfaces are popping up all over the blogosphere (the world of blogs). A few posts worthy of note follow.
Marine GIS Analyst Rajesh is looking for others interested in a Hydrographic Marine GIS Application schema for GML. He notes:
"We used GML 3.0 for developing GIS application schema for conversion of existing Open GIS format data into XML/GML and displayed through SVG viewer. I am very much interested in developing a Hydrographic Marine GIS Application schema using GML Technologies."
Daanish at the NovaGeomatics blog attended GeoTec in Ottawa last month. He sums up what he felt was a consensus there.
"They decided before we can forge ahead with new things like sensor nets, we must perfect existing technologies to be able to handle new things. Basically they want to build a strong base from which new things can be built. Instead of focusing on 'corporate toys' like Google Earth, we need to get back to basics and perfect the inner workings of various technologies like GML, WMS, and WFS. To those at the conference, the current technologies are too slow, too bulky, and too rough around the edges to earn mainstream acceptance."
|
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
Together with OGC, IEEE and ESA, the European Union Satellite Centre (EUSC) is organizing a conference on Image Information Mining for Security and Intelligence on November 27-8, 2006 at EUSC, Torrejon air base, Madrid. The conference is free, until space is filled. Details and the call for papers, due July 15, are online.
An error in the last OGC News had the date of the ISO/TC211 plenary in Riyadh as the 11-15th of July. It is in fact the 14-15th of November 2006. We regret the error.
|
W3C GEOSPATIAL INCUBATOR GROUP
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the creation of the Geospatial Incubator Group on July 5th. The group will address "issues of location and geographical properties of resources for the Web of today and tomorrow."
Sponsors include W3C Members including the Open Geospatial Consortium, Oracle Corporation, SRI International, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI).
W3C Members may join and non-members may request a role as an invited expert to participate.
Joshua Lieberman, of Traverse Technologies, is the chair.
|
WEBSITE OF THE MONTH
Geoportal ZU
The Web portal was recognized by the board of independent industry experts as "The Best of Geo-Application of The Year in 2004." Intergraph's GeoMedia technology is used for the integration of the various formats in which the Czech Land Survey geographic data is stored, the publication of vector and raster data to meet the WMS specification and the automatic export of the data in desired formats.
A bit of the interface and map data from the WMS viewer demo available on the website.
|
IP UPDATE
OGC Web Service, Phase 4 (OWS-4)
The OGC held the OWS-4 Initiative Kickoff meeting at Oracle Corporation in Reston, Virginia on June13-16, 2006.
Jack Pellicci provided leadership and inspiring words to kickoff this meeting. Oracle's Wendy Choate and Ann Fonfara managed the facilities and monitored the daily meetings. More than 110 people participated in the four day meetings.
OWS-4 builds on activities of previous initiatives and to address sponsors' interests and needs which included sensor webs, geospatial digital rights management, geospatial semantics and knowledge management.
The OWS-4 Initiative has been organized around the following threads to address sponsors' requirements and continuation of OGC initiatives of the past.
- Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
- Geo Processing Workflow (GPW)
- Geo Decision Support (GeoDSS)
- Geo-Digital Rights Management (GeoDRM)
- CAD / GIS / BIM
- OGC Location Services (OpenLS)
- Compliance Testing (CITE)
Most of these threads represent continuation of work begun in previous initiatives adding new requirements to continue progress towards maturation of existing specifications and to define new candidate specifications. Others seek to extend the integration of technologies in new areas including CAD/GIS/BIM. This thread seeks to move toward seamless access to information across the extremes of spatial scales, across the different semantic domains and across the lifecycle of a project.
Following the opening plenary, Thread Architects and participants conducted four days of face-to-face meetings to begin work in each thread. A number of cross thread discussions were held to explore technical aspects affecting more than one thread. Among the cross-thread topics covered were:
- Workflow
- Notifications
- Catalogs
- SOAP
- Identity Management
- Security and Trust
Lewis Leinenweber
BAE Systems
OWS-4 Initiative Manager
For more information about the Interoperability Program, contact percivall [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (George Percivall).
|
NEW MEMBERS
OGC welcomes new members who joined us recently.
Blue Marble Geographics (U.S.)
Small Company
Smart Sensor Systems
Small Company
Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) (U.S.)
Research Institute
|
OGC IN THE NEWS
- OGC in the Press
Advances in Geosciences
Special Issue on Earth System Science Data
June 2006
CityGML: An Open Standard for 3D City Models
Thomas Kolbe and Sam Bacharach
Directions Magazine
June 21, 2006
Cadcorp announces three new, free plug-ins for XML-based data
June 2, 2006
Learn to Distinguish "Open Source" and "Open Standards"
Sam Bacharach
GeoWorld
May 2006
Open Source and Open Standards in Geospatial Technologies
Adena Schutzberg
GeoInformatics
April/May 2006
- OGC Press Releases
OGC Web Services for GEOSS Demonstrated at Workshop in China
June 15, 2006
|
EVENTS
July 24-28, 2006
Vancouver, Canada
GeoWeb 2006
July 31, 2006
Denver, Colorado
GSN Demonstration: IGARSS06 conference
October 2-6, 2006
Tyson's Corner, Virginia
OGC Technical and Planning Committee Meetings
November 14-15, 2006
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
ISO/TC 211 23th Plenary
For further info on events please contact gbuehler [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (Greg Buehler).
|
CONTACT
Please send comments and suggestions to:
adena [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (Adena Schutzberg)
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
|
SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
To subscribe send mail to: newsletter-request [at] opengeospatial [dot] org
with "subscribe" (no quotes) in the subject.
To unsubscribe send mail to: newsletter-request [at] opengeospatial [dot] org
with "unsubscribe" (no quotes) in the subject.
Visit our subscription page
|
Copyright 2006 by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
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