OGC Press Releases

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

May 7, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) invites participation in an OGC 3D Fusion Summit to be held June 23, 2009 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The OGC's 3-D Information Management Domain Working Group (3DIM WG) is becoming an important forum activity for discussing and promoting the convergence of 3-D visualization, CAD-GIS integration, and Building Information Modeling (BIM). This effort serves all the stakeholder groups involved with capital facility projects throughout their lifecycle. In addition, the same standards support scene visualization and decision support systems in defense, intelligence and emergency management.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

May 6, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) invites participation in an OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Summit to be held June 24, 2009 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The OGC's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/markets-technologies/swe) enable developers to make all types of sensors, transducers and sensor data repositories discoverable, accessible and useable via the Web. These standards are finding wide use in ocean observation, homeland security, and other domains where Web access to sensors is important.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

May 6, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts.The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) invites participation in an OGC Geospatial Rights Management (GeoRM) Summit to be held June 22, 2009 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Geospatial data and services -- Earth images, GIS, map browsers, location services, navigation, etc. -- have become an integral part of our information environment. But this progress raises issues of security, public access, intellectual property, and emergency use of geospatial information. The issues are complex because geospatial data products are often composed of data from multiple sources which may have different rights and restrictions associated with them. Thus, business and policy issues, not technical issues, are now the industry bottleneck.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA, May 5, 2009. The OGC announced completion of the AECOO-1 (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator) Phase 1 Testbed, a 9-month effort to increase interoperability among software used by architects, construction companies, cost estimators and building energy analysts. On Thursday, May 28, 2009, from 12:00 - 2:00 p.m. EDT, the buildingSMART allianceTM (bSa), the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) and sponsors and participants of the AECOO-1 Testbed will conduct a free webinar demonstrating results from the Testbed.

Effective management of buildings and other capital facilities increasingly requires information exchange among all disciplines and professions that have a stake in the design, construction and operation of those facilities. The AECOO-1 Testbed exchanged building information using Industry Foundation Class (IFC) standards to analyze tradeoffs between construction cost and energy efficiency. This work was preliminary to possible future development of open standards for Web service interfaces. Results will be submitted for consideration by bSa's National Building Information Modeling Standard (NBIMS) Project Committee.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

April 23, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announces the release of two Discussion Papers: Uncertainty Markup Language (UncertML) (http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=33234) and the OpenGIS® Web Coverage Service Standard (WCS) Extension for CF-netCDF Encoding (http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=32195).

UncertML is a conceptual model and XML encoding designed for encapsulating probabilistic uncertainties and may be used to quantify and exchange complex uncertainties in data. Most data contains uncertainty arising from sources such as measurement error, observation operator error, processing/modeling errors, or corruption. Processing uncertain data propagates and often increases uncertainty. Thus there is a need for a standard way of characterizing uncertainty that is readily interpreted by software systems. UncertML is based on a number of ISO and OGC standards, such as ISO 19138 Data Quality Measures, and addresses the ISO/IEC guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement (GUM). UncertML utilizes the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Standard and the OGC Sensor Web Enablement Common (SWE) Standard.

The OGC Web Coverage Service Standard (WCS) Extension for CF-netCDF Encoding provides a way for users of CF-NetCDF (http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/) data to use the OpenGIS Web Coverage Service Interface Standard (WCS). WCS defines a protocol-independent language for the extraction, processing, and analysis of multi-dimensional gridded coverages representing sensor, image, or statistical data. The netCDF (network Common Data Form) interface, library, and format support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. The CF (climate and forecast) metadata conventions provide definitive descriptions of what the netCDF data in each variable represent, including the data’s spatial and temporal properties.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

April 22, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(R)) announces the formation of Domain Working Groups (DWG) for Hydrology (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/hydrologydwg ) and Meteorology (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/meteodwg ).

The OGC’s standards are enabling a new degree of interoperability within and between the hydrology and meteorology communities. The focus now is to leverage these DWG’s to further advance interoperability solutions to benefit these disciplines, which have increasing importance globally in science, policy and decision support.

The Hydrology Domain Working Group brings together experts from this community of interest to develop and promote standards, interoperability and best practices for improving the way in which water information is described and shared. This working group is to be hosted by the OGC and co-chaired by a representative from the World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) Commission for Hydrology (CHy) (http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/hwrp/chy/chy_index.html ).

The purpose of the OGC Meteorology DWG is to provide an open forum for work on meteorological data interoperability, and a route to publication through OGC's standards process (Discussion paper / Best Practice / Standard, and, if appropriate, to ISO status). The goal is to develop standards that meet the specific needs of the World Meteorological Organization (http://www.wmo.int/pages/index_en.html ) and benefit the world weather, water and climate data users and producers.

The OGC’s current standards are enabling a new degree of interoperability within and between the hydrology and meteorology communities. The focus now is to leverage these working groups to further advance interoperability solutions to benefit these disciplines, which have increasing importance in the world scientifically and politically.

David Maidment, Director, Center for Research in Water Resources University of Texas at Austin and leader of the CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc) project on Hydrologic Information Systems, said, “I am most happy to see this collaboration between OGC and WMO to foster web services standards for the hydrology community.”

Chris Little from the UK Met Office, Co-Chair of the Meteorology Domain Working Group, who has been involved in standards for operational meteorology throughout his career, said: “I welcome this practical collaboration to improve meteorological and geospatial standards and services globally. Also, the WMO Commission for Basic Systems, which has just met, has agreed to pursue a formal Memorandum of Understanding with OGC."

An OGC Domain Working Group (DWG) provides a forum for discussion of key interoperability requirements and issues, discussion and review of specifications, and presentations on key technology areas relevant to solving its members’ geospatial interoperability issues.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass., April 21, 2009.On Wednesday, April 29, 2009, from 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. EDT, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) will conduct a free webinar demonstrating results from the OGC Web Services, Phase 6 (OWS-6) testbed activity.

In October, 2008 OWS-6 participants began a set of parallel development activities organized around geospatial interoperability requirements in the following areas:

1. Sensor Web Enablement (SWE): geospatial rights management; interfaces for Chemical-Biological-Radiological-Nuclear (CBRN) sensors; georeferenceable imagery; harmonization of the OGC's OpenGIS® Sensor Model Language (SensorML), Geography Markup Language (GML), and Uncertainty Markup Language (UncertML) Encoding Standards, and the W3C's MathML; and the OGC's Web Notification Service (WNS) Best Practice document.
2. Geo Processing Workflow (GPW): Web services security; asynchronous workflows within and across security domains; Open Grid Forum (OGF) application of services implementing the OpenGIS Web Processing Services (WPS) Interface Standard; GML application schema development and ShapeChange enhancements; and others.
3. Decision Support Services (DSS): ISO 19117 and OpenGIS Style Layer Descriptor (SLD) Encoding Standard portrayal; 3D fly-through; indoor/outdoor 3D route services; OpenGIS Web Map Tiling Service (WMTS) interface development; and integrated clients for multiple OGC Web Service (OWS) services.
4. Aeronautical Information Management (AIM): Web standards for providing up-to-date aeronautical and weather information to pilots and aircraft while at the airport gate or en-route to its destination. To support these goals, the scope of the AIM thread had the following areas of work: Use and enhancement of the OpenGIS® Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard and Filter Encoding (FE) Encoding Standard in support of AIXM features and 4-dimensional flight trajectory queries; architecture for alert/notify of aeronautical information changes; prototype of clients for retrieval, integration and visualization of AIXM content, weather, and other aviation data; emphasizing time and spatial filtering in order to present just the right information into any given user context anytime, anywhere.
5. Compliance and Interoperability Test and Evaluation (CITE): Continued development of robust test and certification tools for OGC standards.

The webinar will demonstrate OWS-6 achievements involving Web services architecture and interoperability solutions that are documented in OGC Engineering Reports. The plan is to release the Engineering Reports as OGC public documents in July, 2009. The SWE, GPW and DSS portions of the demo will show how standards-enabled interoperability supports coordinated responses to a hypothetical disaster scenario involving an airport hostage crisis.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

April 20, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts. The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) request comments to a revision to the OpenGIS® Web Services Common Standard. This document specifies many of the aspects that are common to multiple OGC Web Service (OWS) interface Implementation Standards. These common aspects are primarily parameters and data structures used in operation requests and responses. Examples of common usage are how to handle bounding boxes, exception processing, URL requests, URN expressions, key value encoding, and so forth.

The primary use of OWS Common is as a normative reference for other OWS standards. Those standards currently include the OpenGIS Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS) Standards. Rather than continuing to repeat this material in each Implementation Standard, each standard normatively references each relevant part of OWS Common.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, Mass., April 17, 2009 - The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announces the reopening of a Request For Quotations and Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) to solicit proposals for the Empire Challenge 09 Pilot (EC09 OGC Pilot) that was originally posted in December 2008 and then withdrawn for lack of funding.

Limited funding has now been authorized to accomplish one of the objectives during the EC09 demonstration this July. The sponsor and the OGC are soliciting proposals that provide working services that implement the OpenGIS® Sensor Alert Service (SAS) Best Practice Document on several networks. Responses are due by April 27, 2009 and the Pilot Kickoff Meeting will be the first week of May near Washington, DC. Technology deployments will be complete by July 17, 2009, followed by a two-week demonstration.

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org

Wayland, MA, March 09, 2009. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) (http://www.opengeospatial.org) announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (http://www.noaa.gov) has become a Principal Member of the OGC.

Principal Members evaluate and provide guidance on market direction and Consortium focus, and have authority over the development, release and adoption of OpenGIS® Specifications through their voting rights in the OGC Planning Committee (PC). Principal Members also have approval authority for OGC policies and procedures.