OGC Press Releases

Lance McKee
Senior Consultant
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
phone: 508-752-0108
lmckee@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass., 1 February 2010 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announces a Call for Participation (CFP) in Phase 3 of the GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP) issued by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). The CFP documents are available at: http://earthobservations.org/geoss_call_aip.shtml.

AIP-3 will build on previous project phases and is coordinated with other GEO Tasks. Specific areas of emphasis for AIP-3 include increasing the capacity for GEOSS to support Societal Benefit Areas; building on the AIP Service Architecture and the GEOSS Common Infrastructure; and increasing availability of data in GEOSS in accordance with the GEOSS Data Sharing Guidelines. AIP-3 will be conducted in 2010 with support to the Earth Observation Summit, November 2010.

Lance McKee
Senior Consultant
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Tel: 508-752-0108
lmckee@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA, 1 February 2010. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to enhance the development and use of geospatial standards. It is anticipated that this collaboration will support the implementation of the WMO Information System which aims at providing a single coordinated global infrastructure for the collection and sharing of information in support of all WMO and related international programs.

The MoU formalizes the partners' planned collaboration in the development, application, and promotion of standards and best practices for the content and exchange of meteorological, climatological and hydrological data for the benefit of the worldwide scientific and operational communities of meteorologists and hydrologists.

Outreach Director
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-508-655-5858
outreach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass., 21 January 2010 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announces adoption and availability of the OGC Earth Observation (EO) Application Profile for the OGC Catalogue Services - Web (CSW) Specification 2.0.2. The EO-CSW standard will benefit a wide range of stakeholders involved in the provision and use of data generated by satellite-borne and aerial radar, optical and atmospheric sensors.

The EO-CSW standard describes a set of interfaces, bindings and encodings that can be implemented in catalog servers that data providers will use to publish collections of descriptive information (metadata) about Earth Observation data and services. Developers can also implement this standard as part of Web clients that enable data users and their applications to very efficiently search and exploit these collections of Earth Observation data and services.

Mark Reichardt
President and CEO
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-301 840-1361
mreichardt@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA, 19 January 2010.  The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) and the International Environmental Modeling & Software Society (iEMSs) Secretariat have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate in standards development, education and outreach to enable and promote the use of interoperable Web based geospatial technologies in environmental modeling and software tools.

"The time has come for environmental models to interconnect flexibly with one another and with services and data from other disciplines," explained Phillip C. Dibner, a consulting scientist and engineer, and chair of the OGC Earth System Science Domain Working Group. "Typically, this is difficult and cumbersome, but it becomes much more feasible when models implement open interface and encoding standards..."

Outreach Director
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-508-655-5858
outreach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA, 18 January 2010.On December 8 in Mountain View, California, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) held a special session of the OGC 3DIM (3D Information Management) Domain Working Group to bring together professionals representing standards development organizations and activities working on encoding standards for indoor location and routing, floor plans, and other built environment information. Such standards are needed for applications such as emergency management (EM), outdoor/indoor navigation, and augmented reality. Among the groups represented were the OGC, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) GeoPRIV Working Group, the Open Floor Plan initiative, the OASIS EM Technical Committee, buildingSMART allianceTM, the Korean Spatial Awareness initiative, and the ISO TC 211 Dynamic Position Identification Scheme for Ubiquitous Space (u-Position) activity.

Outreach Director
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-508-655-5858
outreach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass., 6 January 2010 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) is seeking broad input on enhancements and changes for a revision of the OGC City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/citygml). CityGML is an open information model and XML-based encoding for the representation, storage, and exchange of virtual 3D city models. CityGML is implemented as an application schema of the OGC Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3) Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml), an international standard for spatial data exchange and encoding approved by the OGC and ISO.

Frédéric Guillaud
Meteo-France
DSI/DEV
tel: (+33) 5-6107-8118
frederic.guillaud@meteo.fr

Athina Trakas
Director, Business Development, Europe
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
+49-228-54889942
atrakas@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA. 5 Janaury 2010. Meteo- France, the UK Met Office, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) recently held the 2nd Workshop on, The Use of GIS/OGC Standards in Meteorology at the Conference International Centre at Meteo-France, Toulouse, France, from 23-25 November 2009. See http://www.meteo.fr/cic/meetings/gis-ogc/ for details.

Workshop participants reviewed applications of OGC and other standard Web services, encodings, and analytical methodologies being used across the meteorology community; discussed the relationship between the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and OGC; and defined a roadmap for further activities of the OGC Meteorology & Oceanography Domain Working Group. This working group provides an open forum on meteorological and oceanographic systems interoperability and a formal process for developing international consensus standards that may be submitted to the WMO Commission for Basic Systems (CBS) for adoption.

Outreach Director
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-508-655-5858
outreach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA, 3 December, 2009. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) Korea Forum and the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements (KHRIS) co-hosted an OGC Interoperability Day event on 18 November at the KHRIS facility in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.

The day-long program included talks by business, government and academic leaders on topics related to geospatial standardization and interoperability in the context of ubiquitous information services. A key talk was by Dr. Hyong-Bok Kim of the Korea Land & Housing Corporation. He spoke about the National U-City testbed development program, which takes full advantage of OGC Standards. A U-City, or "ubiquitous city", is one in which virtually all information systems -- residential, medical, business, and governmental -- share data, and computers and sensors are fully integrated into the built environment.

Mark Reichardt
President & CEO
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Inc.
+1 301-840-1361
mreichardt@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA, November 20, 2009. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) will launch a Hydrology Interoperability Experiment (HDWG_IE1) on December 8, 2009. The initiators of the experiment seek participation by other organizations interested in developing standard ways of discovering, sharing and interpreting groundwater data using OGC Web Services (OWS) interface and encoding standards.

This interoperability experiment will advance the development of WaterML 2.0 and test its use with various OWS standards, including the OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS), Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Catalog Service Web (CSW) Interface Standards. The experiment will also investigate the interaction of WaterML 2.0 with GroundwaterML (GWML) in scenarios involving the sharing of groundwater data between the USA and Canada.

David Arctur, PhD
Director, Interoperability Programs
OGC
tel: +1-512-771-1434
darctur@opengeospatial.org

October 28, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued a Request for Quotes/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) for the OGC Web Services, Phase 7 (OWS-7) Interoperability Initiative, a testbed to advance OGC's open interoperability framework for geospatial capabilities. The RFQ/CFP is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/60.