OGC Press Releases

10 December 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) reports an important milestone in efforts to have the OGC WaterML 2.0 Encoding Standard adopted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Commission for Hydrology (CHy) as an official WMO/ISO standard.

Representatives from 51 WMO member countries attended the CHy session from 6-14 November 2012 in Geneva and adopted Resolution 7/1, which requests the WMO "Secretariat to take the necessary actions, under the direction of the AWG (CHy Advisory Working Group), to commence a process, including testing, that could potentially see WaterML 2.0 become a WMO standard for information exchange managed by WMO (supported by the WMO/OGC Memorandum of Understanding) and to register this standard as a joint WMO/ISO standard." Furthermore the CHy requests WMO member countries "to actively participate in testing and applying WaterML 2.0 in pilot projects and operational applications and to report their experiences and suggestions to the WMO/OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group...."

The wording of the resolution was chosen carefully and reflected the various participating members' positions on water information standards, but represents an acknowledgement of the need and significance of this work, and a commitment to work to get full WMO endorsement. This was a consensus based consultative process, all the more significant considering that the resolutions are prepared in the 6 WMO official languages (Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, French and English).

OGC WaterML 2.0 is an important new international standard for encoding and exchanging time series water data. It is suitable for the exchange of a broad range of water information typically associated with surface and ground water resource systems. WaterML 2.0 Time Series supports encoding of hydrological and hydrogeological observation data in exchange scenarios such as:

•   Exchange of data for operational monitoring and forecasting programs
•   Supporting infrastructure operation (e.g. dams, supply systems)
•   Exchange of observational and forecast data for surface water and groundwater
•   Release of data for public dissemination
•   Enhancing disaster management through data exchange
•   Exchange in support of national reporting

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 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.

3 December 2012. The Australian Cooperative Research Center for Spatial Information (CRCSI) has joined forces with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) through the signing of a memorandum of understanding. The relationship with OGC will be especially strong with the CRCSI’s Spatial Infrastructures research program.

“We’ll be using OGC and other open standards in our research to help direct development of the next generation of spatial infrastructure in Australia and New Zealand”, says Dr Geoff West, Science Director of the CRCSI’s Spatial Infrastructures research program.

CRCSI input to the OGC will inform the direction of research for existing and new OGC standards. Dr West explained, “By using OGC standards, we ensure our research communicates directly with other systems.”

The agreement will leverage the collective expertise of many of the CRCSI’s partnering organisations to position research outputs for rapid utilization.

Further to the linked research goals, CRCSI and OGC will share outreach and marketing materials to increase awareness of the increasing influential role of open standards in location based research. Joint activities may include introduction of interoperability requirements into the OGC consensus process, and the sponsorship/funding of CRCSI research interoperability and compliance testing requirements in OGC’s Interoperability Program testbeds and pilot initiatives.

“We are particularly pleased with this new partnership. It will expand our reach internationally and accelerate the rate at which we learn about and contribute to international standards developments” says Peter Woodgate, CEO of the CRCSI.

Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC noted, “We are delighted to have CRCSI’s participation and leadership in the OGC international process.  The impact of research organisations like CRCSI in the OGC international process is significant.  Research organisations understand the power of open standards to support the rapid transition of research results into broad community application.  They also benefit by partnering with other OGC public and private sector members to cooperatively advance important research objectives. ”

About CRCSI

The Australian and New Zealand Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI) conducts research and development projects that involve collaboration between government, corporate and academic resources. CRCSI creates new wealth for its participants and the nation through innovative research and application and commercialization of spatial information technologies; through education; and through building collaborative partnerships. CRCSI currently has around 95 partner organisations.

About OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 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.

29 November 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites participation in a Groundwater Interoperability Experiment (GWIE2).

This activity, which began on 23 October 2012, will develop and test the candidate OGC Groundwater Markup Language (GWML) 2 standard by harmonizing and advancing existing initiatives such as GWML1, the EU-INSPIRE effort, GeoSciML, and others. Participants will then prepare an engineering report with the intent to develop it into a data encoding specification that will be advanced toward adoption as the OGC Groundwater Markup Language 2 (GWML 2) Standard. This activity is being carried out within the Hydrology Domain Working Group, which operates under the auspices of the OGC and the World Meteorological Organization.

GWML 2 will meet the requirements for a human-readable and machine-readable transfer standard for groundwater feature data, including data about water wells, aquifers, and related entities. GWML 2 will also serve as a reference for hydrological observations related to these features. (See the OGC WaterML2.0 Encoding Standard.)

The OGC members that are acting as initiators of the Interoperability Experiment are:

• Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
• European Commission (JRC)
• Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)
• US Geological Survey (USGS)

A summary of the activity plan, requirements for participation, schedule, and kick-off meeting details are available at: http://external.opengeospatial.org/twiki_public/HydrologyDWG/GroundwaterInteroperabilityExperiment2.

Expressions of interest for participation are due by 27 December 2012.

Contact Boyan [dot] Brodaric [at] nrcan [dot] gc [dot] ca for further details or to register as a participant.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are part of the OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate specifications into the OGC's Standards Program, where they are formalized for public release. These initiatives enable users and providers of geospatial technology to share the costs of developing standards that provide a foundation for "future-proof" enterprise architectures. Providers reduce their costs of developing and maintaining interfaces and encodings while gaining industry recognition, the confidence of an initiative's sponsoring organizations, and the market growth that results from open standards.

An OGC Interoperability Experiment is a rapid, low overhead, formally structured OGC-facilitated activity in which members achieve specific technical objectives that further the OGC Technical Baseline.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 470 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. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact/.

2 November 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) 2.0 Encoding Standard.

ARML 2.0 provides an interchange format for Augmented Reality applications to describe and interact with objects in an AR scene, with a focus on mobile, vision-based AR. The candidate standard describes the virtual objects that are placed into an AR scene, as well as the registration of the virtual objects in the real world, and allows interaction with and dynamic modification of the AR scene using ECMAScript bindings.

ARML 2.0 emerged from ARML 1.0, developed by the creators of the Wikitude World Browser, and was completely remodeled within the OGC ARML 2.0 Standards Working Group to fit existing AR use cases.

The OGC ARML 2.0 Standards Working Group has set a specific focus on a generic way to describe Trackers in an Augmented Reality environment, allowing users to define a multitude of Trackers, such as Marker-Trackers, Face-Trackers, Natural Feature Trackers and even non-vision-based Trackers, to allow a multitude of AR use cases to be implemented with ARML 2.0.

The OGC ARML 2.0 Encoding Standard Evaluation Package is free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/94. The deadline for comments is 2 December 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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.

5 November 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC SensorML 2.0 Encoding Standard.

SensorML is a machine-readable language for describing sensors, actuators, and processes surrounding measurement. SensorML is a key component of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite of standards. 

SensorML 2.0 includes the following changes to the previous version 1.0.1, which was approved in 2007:

•  Separation of SWE Common Data as a separate standard
•  More tightly defined rules
•  Conformance classes allowing for incremental support of SensorML in software and derived encodings
•  A host of examples provided at initial release of the specification.

In addition, SensorML 2.0 includes the following new or improved features:

•  Support for property extension using external schema
•  Better-defined support for positions and dynamic state (e.g. location, orientation, velocity, and acceleration)
•  Better support for inheritance allowing for compact descriptions of deployed devices and processes
•  Direct access to real-time values and data streams
•  Better support for multiplexed data streaming (i.e. streams with disparate messages).

SensorML 2.0 supports the descriptions of things within the Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) by providing a common standard for sensors ("things the measure"), actuators ("things that act"), and processors ("things that calculate"). Efforts are also underway to take advantage of the complementary role that SensorML 2.0 can play with the OGC City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) Encoding Standard and the candidate OGC standard IndoorGML.

The OGC SensorML 2.0 Encoding Standard Evaluation Package is free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/93. The deadline for comments is 5 December 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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.

30 October 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks comment on a GeoTIFF extension to the OGC GML Coverages (GMLCOV) 1.0 Standard and on a GeoTIFF extension to the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) 2.0 Standard, based on the former.

The OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard is a widely used XML encoding for geospatial data of all types. OGC "coverages", which can be encoded in GML, associate positions within a bounded space to feature attribute values. Examples of these geospatial coverages include Earth images, referenced and non-referenced rasters, curvilinear grids, and point clouds.

The OGC GML 3.2.1 Application Schema – Coverages (GMLCOV), based on OGC Abstract Topic 6 (which is identical to ISO 19123), provides a unified method for encoding OGC coverages in GML, the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Common Standard, and the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard. As GMLCOV is independent of a particular service definition, it allows coverage data to be exchanged through different types of services that implement these OGC standards.

To provide maximum flexibility in sharing coverage data, the GML Coverages GeoTIFF extension provides a way to encode coverages that are represented in encoding formats other than GML, such as GeoTIFF. The WCS 2.0 GeoTIFF extension binds the former extension to WCS 2.0 to allow usage of GeoTIFF encoded coverages with WCS. The OGC seeks public comment on the OGC documents describing the candidate GMLCOV and WCS extension standards for encoding GeoTIFF data in GMLCOV and using them with WCS. These documents are free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/92 .The deadline for comments is 29  November 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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.

29 October 2012

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces that it has appointed Denise McKenzie as Executive Director, Marketing and Communications. Working with OGC staff, board, membership and partner organizations, Denise will be responsible for the planning and execution of marketing, communications and education programs to raise awareness and increase application of OGC standards by technology providers and users worldwide. 

Over the past 12 years Denise has worked with all sectors of the geospatial industry on behalf of the State Government of Victoria (Australia) in areas of strategic policy, collaboration and innovation. Her collaborative work has earned local, national and international industry awards. Throughout her career Denise’s focus has been to utilize public-private partnership and community building to move geospatial from being a niche to a core service within mainstream information technology and decision making process. She has worked in a wide variety of domains including emergency, environment, asset and risk management, business intelligence, positioning and navigation. In the past 12 months she has led the formation of the OGC ANZ Forum and has been working with the Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) on the ANZ Spatial Marketplace. 


Mark Reichardt commented, "I am delighted that Denise is joining the OGC staff. She brings a tremendous level of energy, experience, enthusiasm and skill to the OGC international team, including an exceptional background in communications and information technology policy. She has a great track record of bringing people together across our industry's private, public, academic and research sectors to achieve common goals. Leading OGC's international marketing and communications program from an office based in the UK, Denise will also boost OGC's presence in Europe, where we currently have staff in Brussels and Bonn." 

Denise McKenzie added, “It is quite exciting to be joining the OGC at a time when the geospatial and location industry is experiencing such an amazing period of growth, innovation and opportunity. I am looking forward to working with the skilled and passionate community of OGC to promote and share the benefits of our standards across the world.”

The OGC is a major international standards consortium of more than 465 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. The consortium has played the lead role since 1994 in making geospatial information – location, GIS, Earth images, routing, etc. – an integral part of the global information infrastructure.  OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT, empowering 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.

24 October 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced the formation of a new OGC® Technical Committee Standards Working Group (SWG) to advance the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The OGC members convening this group invite the public to comment on the GeoPackage SWG charter (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/50347) and will consider comments received before 14 November 2012.

Mobile device users who require geospatial application services and associated data and who operate in disconnected or limited network connectivity environments frequently do not have open, available geospatial data to support their applications. Applications include mobile workforce data capture and updates, volunteered geographic information, and real time annotations of map data in an emergency event.

OGC members are proposing an open, non-proprietary, platform-independent GeoPackage container for distribution and direct use of all kinds of geospatial data. The GeoPackage container and related API will increase the cross-platform interoperability of geospatial applications and web services in the mobile world.  Standard APIs for access and management of GeoPackage data will provide consistent query and update results across such applications and services. 

Future enhancements to the GeoPackage standard, a future GeoPackage Web Service standard, and modifications to existing OGC Web Service (OWS) standards to use GeoPackages as exchange formats will allow OWS to support provisioning of GeoPackages throughout an enterprise or information community.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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. 

24 October 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate "GML-NIL profile" of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding standard. GML is a widely used XML grammar for encoding information about geographical features. The GML-NIL profile provides a way to allow data providers to make a best effort to supply data according to an application schema, even if they do not have values for all feature properties. This is achieved by marking the application schema as a whole as ‘nillable=true’ and using OGC ‘nil’ URIs in links for missing data. This reverses the usual pattern which has a default value of nillable=false.   

The GML-NIL pattern of use has been used informally for several years in Earth and environmental science applications, and this candidate standard merely aims to formalize and document the practice. It is expected to be useful in many applications where a heterogeneous community wishes to enable participation by a wide variety of members with different capabilities and data sources. The submission team is composed of members of the GeoSciML project.

The candidate OGC GML-NIL standard document is available for review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/91.

The closing date for comments will be 23 November 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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. 

27 September 2012. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced the formation of a new OGC® Technical Committee Standards Working Group (SWG) to advance the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The OGC members convening this group invite the public to comment on the GeoPackage SWG charter (https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/50347) and will consider comments received before 11 October 2012.

Mobile device users who require geospatial application services and associated data and who operate in disconnected or limited network connectivity environments frequently do not have open, available geospatial data to support their applications. Applications include mobile workforce data capture and updates, volunteered geographic information, and real time annotations of map data in an emergency event.

OGC members are proposing an open, non-proprietary, platform-independent GeoPackage container for distribution and direct use of all kinds of geospatial data. The GeoPackage container and related API will increase the cross-platform interoperability of geospatial applications and web services in the mobile world.  Standard APIs for access and management of GeoPackage data will provide consistent query and update results across such applications and services. 

Future enhancements to the GeoPackage standard, a future GeoPackage Web Service standard, and modifications to existing OGC Web Service (OWS) standards to use GeoPackages as exchange formats will allow OWS to support provisioning of GeoPackages throughout an enterprise or information community.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 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.